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Show HN: Borg Voice Generator

71 points by dsteinman 7y ago

devbas 7y ago
It doesn't work for me in Safari on Mac
- dsteinman 7y ago
  I've had trouble identifying why. Safari has a largely compatible AudioContext API, and there's no errors, but the audio never starts playing and there's no "onended" event when it's supposed to be done. So I'm a bit stumped at the moment.
- jammygit 7y ago
  Same for me (safari on iOS)
- dexwiz 7y ago
  Same for Safari on iPhone
- greggman2 7y ago
  Safari has all kinds of issues with audio. Every report just leads to a rdar: url and then silence, both from Apple and from Safari haha (cry) For a while couldn't send streamed but redirected audio through the webaudio api on Safari only. Workaround was to manually catch the redirect but the latest safari that doesn't help. Like WebGL I don't think Apple wants Web Audio to work. They've got several outstanding bugs in WebGL (3yrs+) and their non-existent WebGL2 support as not seen a single commit in > 3yrs. Web Audio appears to be the same. It's frustrating.
  - tinus_hn 7y ago
    They do have their own Apple Music streaming platform, perhaps you can just do what they do
m4r35n357 7y ago
scary!
nulbyte 7y ago
Fun project, I'm sure, but sounds nothing like the Borg I remember.
- dsteinman 7y ago
  You be the judge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxImROvCnj8&feature=youtu.be&t=76 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxImROvCnj8&feature=youtu.be... https://jaxcore.github.io/jaxcore-say/borg-example/?say=d2UgaGF2ZSBhbmFseXplZCB5b3VyIGRlZmVuY2l2ZSBjYXBhYmlsaXRpZXMgYXMgYmVpbmcgdW5hYmxlIHRvIHdpdGhzdGFuZCB1cy4uLiBpZiB5b3UgZGVmZW5kIHlvdXJzZWx2ZXMgeW91IHdpbGwgYmUgcHVuaXNoZWQ%3D https://jaxcore.github.io/jaxcore-say/borg-example/?say=d2Ug...
- Gys 7y ago
  I agree, this is how I remember it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyenRCJ_4Ww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyenRCJ_4Ww
  - UI_at_80x24 7y ago
    Same here. It's obvious from the other clip provided that the voice evolved over time; but it's not something I noticed at the time. The voice you linked to is the one that is most memorable to me.
    - mathgeek 7y ago
      > It's obvious from the other clip provided that the voice evolved over time I'd be surprised if this wasn't intentional, based on the premise.
- pvg 7y ago
  Makes it more interesting, in a way - who knew there was an uncanny valley between humans trying sound cybernetic and software trying to sound like humans trying to sound cybernetic.
- KenoFischer 7y ago
  I always liked the Borg voice in Voyager. It had the reverberating "many voices" feel, e.g. in https://youtu.be/4bkw69E_C4g https://youtu.be/4bkw69E_C4g
agucova 7y ago
I've always wondered if there is something like this for the voice of Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (Computer). I know her voice was recorder phonetically before she died (https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-voice-of-star-treks-computers-could-be-coming-to-bo-1786251988 https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-voice-of-star-treks-computers-co...), but I don't think there's public access to that. Perhaps transfer learning could be used to copy the style, using something like SV2TTS.
- dsteinman 7y ago
  As far as I know they have not released those phonetic recordings. But even without those recordings it might be possible to use those deepfake voice fingerprinting systems to build an STT engine from sound clips from the show.
  - makerofspoons 7y ago
    IIRC there are a lot of sound clips voiced by her on the Star Trek Encyclopedia CD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Trek_Encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Trek_Encyclopedia
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- monocasa 7y ago
  I've been looking into that too. Where I'm at now: there's an audio book she recorded, which is on the edge of being a large enough corpus for a third party to generate a model. I haven't listened to it yet though, so I don't know of it's in the right flat intonation to be easily usable.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    There’s an HN thread within the last few weeks discussing research presented showing ML needing only five seconds of someone’s speech to replicate them. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21525878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21525878
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
UI_at_80x24 7y ago
Very cool effort, but I think it sounds more like Daleks from Dr. Who. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQLbwOGT8eM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQLbwOGT8eM
- Vysero 7y ago
  Agreed, the Borg voices are much deeper and certainly aren't don't have a British accent.
- Etheryte 7y ago
  This is very spot on, especially if you use some standard Dalek lines. A good example to test: "The Doctor is detected: terminate, terminate! Seek, locate, destroy."
- MarcScott 7y ago
  Reminded me of the Vogans from the original radio show of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But that might just be my memory playing tricks.
- nerfhammer 7y ago
  Incidentally the Dalek voice is an effect that can be accomplished really cheaply in hardware or software, called a ring modulator: https://webaudio.prototyping.bbc.co.uk/ring-modulator/ https://webaudio.prototyping.bbc.co.uk/ring-modulator/
  - davidw 7y ago
    Dr Who used cheap special effects?! Say it ain't so! I loved the Tom Baker version as a kid.
- mellosouls 7y ago
  I have a friend who is very handy, very into building vintage stuff. Cars, bikes, etc. One day he rang on some unrelated subject, I could hear he was on the motorway, I asked him where he was going. "Oh I'm just off to get a voice box for my dalek". Like that's the most normal thing in the world. Sure enough, next time I visited, a certain iconic malevolent alien, that fears only stairs, was sitting in the corner of the garage, happily murderously chuntering away every time he pressed the button.
durpleDrank 7y ago
It would be fun if you could generate a link with a hash of a message so you can send it to your friends and coworkers with a silly message that autoplays.
- dsteinman 7y ago
  It already does this, when you click the "say" button it generates a base64 url. You can share that url. The problem is when someone loads the URL the browser will not autoplay the clip. You have to click a button (or some other user interaction) to start the Web Audio API, it's a really annoying limitation that I wish Firefox and Chrome would change to a one-time popup confirmation. So what I did was hide the text box until after playing the audio.
degenerate 7y ago
Can this be modified to include the original voices from the 1998 Microsoft Sam TTS Generator, or is that voice technology not open-source? ex: https://tetyys.com/SAPI4/ https://tetyys.com/SAPI4/
- dsteinman 7y ago
  I like the way that one sounds. But it looks like it's using a server-side script to generate the audio: view-source:https://tetyys.com/SAPI4/scripts/tts.js https://tetyys.com/SAPI4/scripts/tts.js
greggman2 7y ago
This is cool but I'm curious why it sounds so much worse than the built in speech to text API http://greggman.github.io/fanfictionreader/ http://greggman.github.io/fanfictionreader/ Which voices are available are browser and OS dependent and there's no "borg" voice anymore. There used to be several alien and or non human voices but Apple removed them from the OS and most browsers just call the OS's text to speech API --correction-- You need to go into the VoiceOver Utilities and add all the novalaty voices back in https://recordit.co/ZGgw9MhepW https://recordit.co/ZGgw9MhepW
- dsteinman 7y ago
  This wasn't made with the window.speechSynthesis API, it's using 2 older systems (espeak and sam) that have been ported to JavaScript. They don't sound as good but they generate AudioContext data which can be processed, mixed, and visualized in the browser. I don't think it wouldn't be possible to make this kind of Borg voice using the speechSynthesis API -- I did it by generating the speech using 6 voices, 3 in each channel. I totally agree the built-in OS speech systems sound better over and I may end up adding window.speechSynthesis support to the API I made so it'll expose more voice profiles, but those ones will lack the visualization ability.

71 points by dsteinman 7y ago

devbas 7y ago

It doesn't work for me in Safari on Mac

dsteinman 7y ago
I've had trouble identifying why. Safari has a largely compatible AudioContext API, and there's no errors, but the audio never starts playing and there's no "onended" event when it's supposed to be done. So I'm a bit stumped at the moment.
jammygit 7y ago
Same for me (safari on iOS)
dexwiz 7y ago
Same for Safari on iPhone
greggman2 7y ago
Safari has all kinds of issues with audio. Every report just leads to a rdar: url and then silence, both from Apple and from Safari haha (cry) For a while couldn't send streamed but redirected audio through the webaudio api on Safari only. Workaround was to manually catch the redirect but the latest safari that doesn't help. Like WebGL I don't think Apple wants Web Audio to work. They've got several outstanding bugs in WebGL (3yrs+) and their non-existent WebGL2 support as not seen a single commit in > 3yrs. Web Audio appears to be the same. It's frustrating.
- tinus_hn 7y ago
  They do have their own Apple Music streaming platform, perhaps you can just do what they do

m4r35n357 7y ago

scary!

nulbyte 7y ago

Fun project, I'm sure, but sounds nothing like the Borg I remember.

dsteinman 7y ago
You be the judge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxImROvCnj8&feature=youtu.be&t=76 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxImROvCnj8&feature=youtu.be... https://jaxcore.github.io/jaxcore-say/borg-example/?say=d2UgaGF2ZSBhbmFseXplZCB5b3VyIGRlZmVuY2l2ZSBjYXBhYmlsaXRpZXMgYXMgYmVpbmcgdW5hYmxlIHRvIHdpdGhzdGFuZCB1cy4uLiBpZiB5b3UgZGVmZW5kIHlvdXJzZWx2ZXMgeW91IHdpbGwgYmUgcHVuaXNoZWQ%3D https://jaxcore.github.io/jaxcore-say/borg-example/?say=d2Ug...
Gys 7y ago
I agree, this is how I remember it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyenRCJ_4Ww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyenRCJ_4Ww
- UI_at_80x24 7y ago
  Same here. It's obvious from the other clip provided that the voice evolved over time; but it's not something I noticed at the time. The voice you linked to is the one that is most memorable to me.
  - mathgeek 7y ago
    > It's obvious from the other clip provided that the voice evolved over time I'd be surprised if this wasn't intentional, based on the premise.
pvg 7y ago
Makes it more interesting, in a way - who knew there was an uncanny valley between humans trying sound cybernetic and software trying to sound like humans trying to sound cybernetic.
KenoFischer 7y ago
I always liked the Borg voice in Voyager. It had the reverberating "many voices" feel, e.g. in https://youtu.be/4bkw69E_C4g https://youtu.be/4bkw69E_C4g

agucova 7y ago

I've always wondered if there is something like this for the voice of Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (Computer). I know her voice was recorder phonetically before she died (https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-voice-of-star-treks-computers-could-be-coming-to-bo-1786251988 https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-voice-of-star-treks-computers-co...), but I don't think there's public access to that. Perhaps transfer learning could be used to copy the style, using something like SV2TTS.

dsteinman 7y ago
As far as I know they have not released those phonetic recordings. But even without those recordings it might be possible to use those deepfake voice fingerprinting systems to build an STT engine from sound clips from the show.
- makerofspoons 7y ago
  IIRC there are a lot of sound clips voiced by her on the Star Trek Encyclopedia CD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Trek_Encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Trek_Encyclopedia
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
monocasa 7y ago
I've been looking into that too. Where I'm at now: there's an audio book she recorded, which is on the edge of being a large enough corpus for a third party to generate a model. I haven't listened to it yet though, so I don't know of it's in the right flat intonation to be easily usable.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  There’s an HN thread within the last few weeks discussing research presented showing ML needing only five seconds of someone’s speech to replicate them. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21525878 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21525878

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

UI_at_80x24 7y ago

Very cool effort, but I think it sounds more like Daleks from Dr. Who. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQLbwOGT8eM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQLbwOGT8eM

Vysero 7y ago
Agreed, the Borg voices are much deeper and certainly aren't don't have a British accent.
Etheryte 7y ago
This is very spot on, especially if you use some standard Dalek lines. A good example to test: "The Doctor is detected: terminate, terminate! Seek, locate, destroy."
MarcScott 7y ago
Reminded me of the Vogans from the original radio show of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But that might just be my memory playing tricks.
nerfhammer 7y ago
Incidentally the Dalek voice is an effect that can be accomplished really cheaply in hardware or software, called a ring modulator: https://webaudio.prototyping.bbc.co.uk/ring-modulator/ https://webaudio.prototyping.bbc.co.uk/ring-modulator/
- davidw 7y ago
  Dr Who used cheap special effects?! Say it ain't so! I loved the Tom Baker version as a kid.
mellosouls 7y ago
I have a friend who is very handy, very into building vintage stuff. Cars, bikes, etc. One day he rang on some unrelated subject, I could hear he was on the motorway, I asked him where he was going. "Oh I'm just off to get a voice box for my dalek". Like that's the most normal thing in the world. Sure enough, next time I visited, a certain iconic malevolent alien, that fears only stairs, was sitting in the corner of the garage, happily murderously chuntering away every time he pressed the button.

durpleDrank 7y ago

It would be fun if you could generate a link with a hash of a message so you can send it to your friends and coworkers with a silly message that autoplays.

dsteinman 7y ago
It already does this, when you click the "say" button it generates a base64 url. You can share that url. The problem is when someone loads the URL the browser will not autoplay the clip. You have to click a button (or some other user interaction) to start the Web Audio API, it's a really annoying limitation that I wish Firefox and Chrome would change to a one-time popup confirmation. So what I did was hide the text box until after playing the audio.

degenerate 7y ago

Can this be modified to include the original voices from the 1998 Microsoft Sam TTS Generator, or is that voice technology not open-source? ex: https://tetyys.com/SAPI4/ https://tetyys.com/SAPI4/

dsteinman 7y ago
I like the way that one sounds. But it looks like it's using a server-side script to generate the audio: view-source:https://tetyys.com/SAPI4/scripts/tts.js https://tetyys.com/SAPI4/scripts/tts.js

greggman2 7y ago

This is cool but I'm curious why it sounds so much worse than the built in speech to text API http://greggman.github.io/fanfictionreader/ http://greggman.github.io/fanfictionreader/ Which voices are available are browser and OS dependent and there's no "borg" voice anymore. There used to be several alien and or non human voices but Apple removed them from the OS and most browsers just call the OS's text to speech API --correction-- You need to go into the VoiceOver Utilities and add all the novalaty voices back in https://recordit.co/ZGgw9MhepW https://recordit.co/ZGgw9MhepW

dsteinman 7y ago
This wasn't made with the window.speechSynthesis API, it's using 2 older systems (espeak and sam) that have been ported to JavaScript. They don't sound as good but they generate AudioContext data which can be processed, mixed, and visualized in the browser. I don't think it wouldn't be possible to make this kind of Borg voice using the speechSynthesis API -- I did it by generating the speech using 6 voices, 3 in each channel. I totally agree the built-in OS speech systems sound better over and I may end up adding window.speechSynthesis support to the API I made so it'll expose more voice profiles, but those ones will lack the visualization ability.