9 ms·
Deepgram – Find Damning Soundbites
- theparanoid 10y agoThere's little evidence the trump clip was found using 'new tech'. Most likely somebody in Access Hollywood remembered recording it and it went from there.
- R_haterade 10y agoSome say Billy Bush himself was involved, beyond just being in the recording.
- sverige 10y agoAfter watching the video, Billy Bush seemed more lecherous than Trump after they got off the bus. Not defending Trump, but since there's no context at the start, I wonder if Bush steered the conversation down that road in the first place.
- tomtoise 10y agoWell then it backfired horribly. http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/09/media/billy-bush-nbc-today-show-donald-trump/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/09/media/billy-bush-nbc-today-s...
- R_haterade 10y agoHe's a bush. He'll land on his feet, I promise.
- ojbyrne 10y agoThe article seems fairly careful to not claim that.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- throwanem 10y agoThe article is a marketing piece for a technology sold by its publisher.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- salimmadjd 10y agoNo real "journalist" should be looking for soundbites. It's the job of special interest groups and super PACs.
- gh1 10y agoTL;DR A deep learning algorithm for searching words ("freedom", "Obama" etc.) in a recorded audio/video clip. The title is clickbait, but the claim is rather interesting. It says that it has 80 % accuracy for transcribing an audio clip compared to 20 % for speech-to-text.
- abrookewood 10y agoI thought the figures sound a little suspect too - if automated text-to-speech was really that bad, then presumably products like Dragon Dictate etc would never have been successful. Obviously they have the benefit of training, but still, 20% sounds ludicrously low.
- dsyko 10y ago20% is very low. We use machine transcription at work, and although the per-word confidence of machine algorithms varies wildly given the quality of the audio and the speaker's mannerisms. It can easily get into the 80% range with good audio, especially televised audio where people are close to microphones and there is not a lot of non-speech noise.
- jxramos 10y agoI had a friend working in speech recognition at Nuance for several years. I'm trying to remember what sort of accuracy he quoted to me about two years ago. It was something large like 80% or something and that getting the last stretch of accuracy was really hard with the techniques they employed back then. That figure may have been for a very specific application, which was a lot of phone menu stuff. He then moved on to Siri at Apple.
- draugadrotten 10y agoMicrosoft claims 93-94 percent correct, or in other words "6.3% word error rate" http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-newest-milestone-worlds-lowest-error-rate-in-speech-recognition/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-newest-milestone-wor...
- CoryG89 10y ago
- tspike 10y agoThis tech, of course, has utility for many professions beyond journalism. Given the expansive nature of our laws, it is impossible for anyone not to break a law at some point. When it's possible to simply search a massive database for any transgression, enforcement becomes an arbitrary endeavor. What checks can be put in place for this?
- sverige 10y agoWe could stop making certain kinds of speech illegal. (Not including "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater.")
- dredmorbius 10y agoThis goes far beyond speech. Fraud, misrepresentation, drug use, sexual harassment, conspiracy, aiding and abetting, stolen property, just off the top of my head. Drawn from financial records, statements, documents, phone calls, social graphs, etc. You're coming across as rather too narrowly focused.
- jimmytidey 10y agoThe speech isn't illegal. In this case someone is indicating that in the past they've sexually assaulted someone. The speech is just evidence pointing towards the act, and the act is the problem.
- dredmorbius 10y agoMy point isn't that the speech is illegal. It's that there are vast huge classes of criminal conduct which, merited or otherwise could almost certainly be applied against virtually anyone you cared to, with pervasive audio monitoring and search. Cardinal Richelieu wrote some six lines or so on this subject. You should look them up. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cardinal_Richelieu (Or perhaps not, the authenticity is, as many things are, disputed. But he carries the blame. Which is perhaps the most poetic justice of this point. Or is it injustice. Words, words, words.)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- yakult 10y agoThe next logical evolution is to make your own Vocaloid using publically available speeches, and synthesize any soundbite you want. Coming to you 2020: president candidate X may or may not have said that he hates women, kicks babies, love hitler, and plans to nuke Wales. You don't even care any more because your airwaves have been saturated with both candidates (and their Vocaloids) saying all kinds of crazy shit in disinformation and counter-disinformation and counter-counter-information campaigns and everybody's desensitized.
- Kronopath 10y agoAlready exists, in some form: http://talkobamato.me/synthesize.py?speech_key=77ff00cb8af500c23d74d5bbc7f05560 http://talkobamato.me/synthesize.py?speech_key=77ff00cb8af50...
- elcapitan 10y ago""" Greetings Professor Falken Hello A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. """
- btown 10y agoSomeone actually did make soundbanks based on syllables/morae from Trump and Sanders speeches, for the freeware (sadly not open-source) version of Vocaloid [1]. While it is technically extremely difficult to use this technology to approximate English speech (which has a much wider array of possible phonemes than Japanese), the soundbanks can already "cover" some of the more famous Japanese Vocaloid songs [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utau - which incidentally was the software that created the voice for that erstwhile Nyan Cat meme [2] http://store.vocallective.net/album/trumploid-vs-sanderpoid-2016 http://store.vocallective.net/album/trumploid-vs-sanderpoid-...
- RGamma 10y agoIt gets even better when combined with Face2Face, a live-editing software that can transfer facial expressions including lip movements from actors to e.g. politicians on TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk
- grogenaut 10y agoCursory use of the app failed on all searches: I searched for oil, mexico, automatic weapons, isis... it found "crisis", a reference to oil without actually being on the correct time stamp, mexico got several 50% results none of which were isis. automatic weapons got "nuclear weapons". so basically 0/4 searches. pretty sure that most networks use the closed caption data to find clips. NBC had an indexed system for all of their tapes in prototype in 98 for their whole back catalog. Not sure if it ever went online.
- gaius 10y agoI just wanted to check that none of us have ever said something among friends that we wouldn't want random people or employers hearing about even years later? Even one sentence that could be taken out of context? And we're totally cool about being fired over it? Just checking.
- pjc50 10y agoOf course we're not cool about that, but I don't think that applies to presidents. The president isn't an "employee".
- gaius 10y agoBilly Bush is tho'.
- philh 10y agoI think it very much applies to presidents. There are vastly more important considerations for a president than "has never said anything regrettable".
- notahacker 10y agoBut nobody uses "has never said anything regrettable" as the litmus test for Presidency. On the other hand "audio searches reveal the presidential candidate is telling a massive lie about always having expressed profoundly opposition to Controversial Thing X, and actually repeatedly ridiculed the cause in not well-reported meetings prior to becoming the candidate" could and should be an electoral issue.
- gaius 10y agoYes and no. If I were ever running for POTUS I'd rather not anything I might or might not have said about radical Marxism while I was a student coming to define my candidacy. Because this isn't about the one specific case of Trump, once this cat is out of the bag there's no putting it back.
- mobiuscog 10y ago'Journalists' don't need to find damning soundbites - they're given them by the opposition.
- dredmorbius 10y agoFair point that Opposition Research is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_research
- dredmorbius 10y agoOK, throw this into the mix: many of you reading this have smartphones which are voice controlled, and for which voice control is activated at all times. In the case of Google, that processing must take place on Google's centralised servers. Siri may or may not do centralised processing (and can operate in standalone modes). Microsoft's Cortana, Facebook's "M" (IIRC) and Amazon's Aero are all various stylings of "Stasi in a Glade form factor", as Maciej Czeglowski so memorably put it.[1] Voice stores distressingly cheaply in terms of space, and with the Internet of (broken) Things (that spy on you), odds of finding yourself surrounded by microphones in the most unexpected locations,[2] controlled by a wide variety of quite probably competing interests.[3] And if they cannot find what they're looking for in the surveillance tape itself, they'll simply manufacture their own evidence using your own phonemes[4] and video.[5] ________________________________ Notes: 1. https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/732985370204233728 https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/732985370204233728 2. http://www.inquisitr.com/3097029/government-surveillance-in-san-francisco-hidden-microphones-planted-by-fbi-at-bus-stops-under-rocks/ http://www.inquisitr.com/3097029/government-surveillance-in-... 3. http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2016/09/cory-doctorowthe-privacy-wars-are-about-to-get-a-whole-lot-worse/ http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2016/09/cory-doctorowth... 4. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/hacking-forgeries/499775/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/09/hackin... 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk
- AlexCoventry 10y ago> In the case of Google, that processing must take place on > Google's centralised servers Doesn't recognition of the initialization phrase "OK, google" take place on the phone? Sending a continuous stream of audio back to google servers sounds expensive.
- dredmorbius 10y agoAFAIU (which is little), "OK, Google" is processed locally. Whatever follows is processed remotely. I should have mentioned voice-activated televisions as a whole 'nother class of attack.
- thr328982 10y agoI found something really sexist: > Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.
- thr328982 10y agoHere is another one: > Marriage has historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time, and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman
- wwweston 10y ago"Every proclamation guaranteed free ammunition for your enemies..."
- manifestsilence 10y ago"Why do you act like you're the smartest in the room, why do you act like you're the smartest in the room..."