17 ms·

15.ai

536 points by memorable 4y ago

disprog 4y ago
First randomly generated text was "Have you read your SICP today?" Brings back fond memories of /prog/ and all its nonsense. Praise The Sussman!
- 15ai 4y ago
  To be honest, I thought more people on HN would appreciate the little in-jokes that I added to the website (such as the Interjection copypasta and the multiple Rickrolls hidden throughout), but it's nice to see that some people do still share my lame attempt at humor :)
kybernetyk 4y ago
meh/10
darkerside 4y ago
Unfortunately, I guess I've reached the stage of my life where there are only three choices I actually would recognize out of the entire selection
kellymore 4y ago
Are you open to talking about your research and how devs can go about building something like this from scratch? How can people best connect with you?
armchairhacker 4y ago
This is really cool. It's a text-to-speech and the gist seems to be that they synthesize it from only a little audio. The results are clearly synthetic and need work. However what's cool is that there are a ton of characters (from popular shows and video games) and there are useful statistics like inferred emotion (which is also in the output). Honestly it's a big problem how a lot of AIs are like "black boxes" where you really can't customize or see anything. Yeah we have DALL-E and GPT which can generate text images but the lack of customization or fine-tuning the image afterwards severely hinders what's possible with them. Ultimately what you want is something interactive, where you can control how much or little the AI generates, and give it really specific criterion. But seriously: how did you get the domain `15.ai`?
- marcofatica 4y ago
  > But seriously: how did you get the domain `15.ai`? it's an MIT project so I'm sure that was a factor
  - paulsutter 4y ago
    .ai domains cost a couple hundred bucks a year so domains are very available / not widely used by domain squatters (Its the country domain for the island of Anguilla, pop 15,000)
    - mfkp 4y ago
      $65/year on Porkbun, not terrible.
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  I just used it to make spongebob squarepants say bad things.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
    This thing synthesizes dolphin squeaks? Wow!
- Deritio 4y ago
  Dall-E 2 has customization. You can remove or add things etc. And for GPT you can also specify more details. Only a question of time until you can work with the ai on your art/thing. There are ai models which keep track of context and others which generate a plan of actions. AI is not a blackbox
  - sterlind 4y ago
    OpenAI itself is a black box. Until I can reproduce their models or download them myself, and have unfettered access to them, it's just gatekept magic behind an API. So much for democratizing machine learning.
jason2323 4y ago
Hah! If you click on reject on the cookies window it rickrolls[1] you! [1]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rick%20Roll https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rick%20Roll
- capelio 4y ago
  Except that wasn’t a cookies acceptance window…
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Those 2 comments sum up the web in 2022
WalterGR 4y ago
If anyone is curious, the previous submission of this was popular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25654118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25654118
hojjat12000 4y ago
They named their tts "Deep Throat"? Why would you?
- Bytewave81 4y ago
  They knew.
- latenightcoding 4y ago
  bronnies
- xdennis 4y ago
  It could be a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Throat_(Watergate) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Throat_(Watergate)
  - mgdlbp 4y ago
    to the DeepFoo pattern in deep learning naming, more likely.
    - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
      Why not both at once?
      - mgdlbp 4y ago
        Sill nothing to top 'DeepCreamPy' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29737049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29737049
        mgdlbp 4y ago
        All six contiguous subsequences of the three tokens have meaning: - Deep, because it's deep-learning based - Cream, referring to its pornographic application - Py, as it's written in Python - DeepCream is close to DeepDream - CreamPy is homophonic to creampie - As a whole, homophonous to deep creampie, a meaningful pairing of noun and adjective
eljimmy 4y ago
This is unrelated but what's with the fascination with HN users and My Little Pony? I've noticed this on a lot of posts in the past few months.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  It's basically the same as unironic appreciation of various child-targeted-but-adult-friendly 'slice of life' anime, just more incongruous-seeming because of the 'pony' thing.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Slice of life anime are targeted to college students and usually air too late at night for kids to catch them.
- drblue 4y ago
  Friendship is Magic was a legitimately good show. (Or at least Season 1 and 2 were).
- loves_mangoes 4y ago
  A lot of people in or around tech are furries, are into things like japanese animation, or are into My Little Pony. I don't consider myself one, but people often jokingly say that furries run the Internet. And it's not really specific to HN. For instance you have well-known people in the community who do vaccine R&D, or cryptography, or contribute to the C/C++ standards at ISO, or several other STEM things that are pretty outspoken about their interests. This is made more obvious on Twitter, where people tend to blur their personal and work identities a lot.
- btown 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony:_Friendship_Is_Magic_fandom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony:_Friendship_Is_... explains in detail - between 2010 and ~2015 there was a massive overlap between millennial geek culture and unironic fandom of the rebooted My Little Pony show, especially among millennial men. One dedicated fan hub averaged almost 400k page views per day over its first 3.5 years of existence. And throughout it all, programming projects abounded, such as the delightful FiM++ esoteric language (https://esolangs.org/wiki/FiM%2B%2B https://esolangs.org/wiki/FiM%2B%2B) styled after the show's framing device. For many in tech now, it was an inescapable part of internet culture of the early 2010s, and a fond memory for many.
convery 4y ago
Interesting how it seems like there's little correlation between source sample-size and quality. e.g. the Portal Sentry turret at 1.5min input vs the 100+ minutes of the narrator from Stanly Parable which sounded like auto-tune had a stroke.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  Much of it depends on refinement work on each specific model. Try the Daria voices, for example, which are easy to get results with that sound like they came straight out of the show.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  The AI seems to work best on high-pitched, female voices. The model seems to have improved in this regard since I last tried this website, but it's still very significantly biased towards female voices it seems.
- esjeon 4y ago
  I think it's because the underlying(?) TTS can't really portrait how the narrator speaks, which is very exaggerating and highly varying in tempo. The key idea of the app should be that we can easily transform "voice AND emotional tone" of the underlying voice.
ntoskrnl 4y ago
The Chell voice from Portal is extremely accurate
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  How does she compare to the Gordon Freeman model?
- blooalien 4y ago
  100% accurate to be precise. ;)
  - deathanatos 4y ago
    I think that depends on whether you subscribe to Chell not having a voice, or having a voice and simply not using it. The game is silent on whether Chell can't talk, or simply has nothing to say to the AI around her.
    - fdschonborn 4y ago
      IIRC the official explanation of why Chell is silent through the games is that she's just _really_ pissed all the time.
lagrange77 4y ago
I only get white noise after trying several inputs. Alignment Confidence > 80%
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nope96 4y ago
Oh god, 50 shades of SpongePants. The future is wild in ways I never imagined. Star Trek style holodecks in what, 15 years? So, creepy thought: should we be recording audio of our parents, so we can still "hear from them" once in a while after they die? People are going to want to reconstruct their lost loved ones with AI. This project seems to imply you only need an hour or so of audio.
- Engineering-MD 4y ago
  There is a black mirror episode about this which then extends into a whole robotic replacement for a lost loved one. As with all black mirror episodes, it’s pretty dystopian.
- batch12 4y ago
  After my dad died, we found that he had recorded every phone call he had with us. I thought about doing this combined with text generation to create plausible prompts but never got the guts to go through with it. He wouldn't care if I had done it, but it wouldn't ease the guilt from years of sighs and rolling my eyes when he called at always the wrong times.
  - gridspy 4y ago
    There is a great story of this - the creation of a "DadBot" https://www.wired.com/story/a-sons-race-to-give-his-dying-father-artificial-immortality/ https://www.wired.com/story/a-sons-race-to-give-his-dying-fa...
- rockemsockem 4y ago
  Sounds like a pretty unhealthy thing to do TBH :/
- Tade0 4y ago
  > So, creepy thought: should we be recording audio of our parents, so we can still "hear from them" once in a while after they die? Wouldn't do it for me. My mother is an artist and makes the most outlandish connections between seemingly unrelated topics on a regular basis.
deeplearner1 4y ago
If you want more information about 15.ai, I highly suggest reading their Wikipedia article! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15.ai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15.ai The whole history behind the project is fascinating: 4chan had a huge role in its development, and the project's work was stolen by an NFT company that a famous voice actor endorsed not too long ago.
- julianeon 4y ago
  Ah, I was wondering why they were so concerned about attribution. The truth is that, today, if I was going to use a tool to generate voices (say for YouTube), I wouldn't necessarily pick a small SaaS tool. I'd use Amazon Polly or some other GCP-style platform voice creation tool. There are already a few products in the space, and their costs are so low as to be almost negligible (example: Polly, 5 million characters free). For a commercial project, I could probably stay on a free tier for a whole year. With Dall*E, it seems like the only option, and it's such a superior option that a website could abuse it for commercial profits. But for voice synthesis, it's already dirt cheap and commercially available without limitations.
  - gwern 4y ago
    15-kun has always been fanatical about attribution; the plagiarism just made him more so.
  - rockemsockem 4y ago
    Polly and GCP's voices still sound a tad robotic though unfortunately :/ 15.ai seems to beat them on some sentences, but not all. Looking forward to the day when we can have real human-level quality of voices on-demand.
forrestthewoods 4y ago
The copyright laws around this are fascinating. They're adamant it must be non-commercial, they must be credited, and it can't be mixed with any other generated content. Meanwhile their content is exclusively derived from popular commercial products. Oh and they also make money via Patreon donations. I dunno. Feels a little gross to me. Eventually there is going to be a big copyright case about a model trained with copyrighted material. I have no idea how that will be resolved. Or maybe there will simply be new laws passed to make it either explicitly ok or explicitly not ok.
- deeplearner1 4y ago
  “Make money”? The creator loses several thousands of dollars a month hosting the site, and it’s done for free. The Patreon donations are all voluntary and only offer a pittance to the developer. I highly suggest reading into the project first. The Wiki article I linked before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15.ai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15.ai) answers all of your questions about copyright infringement.
  - forrestthewoods 4y ago
    Feel free to replace "make money" with "collect revenue". This is currently a research project (with funding). However it's long-term goal is to achieve commercial quality voice acting and dubbing. It could be given away for free, sold directly, sold downstream, sold indirectly, or otherwise generate commercial value. In terms of copyright infringement, your wiki link answers nothing. A court ruled that Google could use copyrighted book text to train an algorithm to improve search results because the copying was highly transformative and did not serve as a market substitute to the original work. Meanwhile 15.ai is using copyrighted voice recordings to train an algorithm to synthesize new voice recordings that sound like they came from the original speaker. This is radically different from the Google case. Just because one instance of using copyrighted material to train an algorithm qualifies as fair use does not mean that all use of copyright material to train any algorithm also qualifies as fair use. There is absolutely nothing about this that is settled law. In the next 20 years there are going to be lots of lawsuits, lots of settlements, possibly a few rulings, and maybe even a few new laws. I find the whole topic very interesting. YMMV.
layer8 4y ago
Well that is one shitty ToS dialog.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
s-xyz 4y ago
The DeepThroat model? Sounds familiar…
quickthrower2 4y ago
What is the tldr. Got a wall of terms of service I didn’t want to agree too and clicking reject was a Rickroll.
vehemenz 4y ago
That's a lot of SpongeBob and My Little Pony characters. At this point, is it fair to say the attachment to kids' cartoons is a cultural (or pathological) phenomenon for under 30s?
_gabe_ 4y ago
> All code and models used for this website were written and trained as part of my research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The code and models are privately owned and are not to be sold or distributed for unauthorized use. Does anybody else find the irony in this statement absolutely amazing lol.
- belter 4y ago
  https://tlo.mit.edu/learn-about-intellectual-property/ownership#:~:text=MIT%20owns%20inventions%20made%20or,a%20written%20agreement%20with%20MIT https://tlo.mit.edu/learn-about-intellectual-property/owners.... "...MIT owns inventions made or created by MIT faculty, students, staff, and others participating in sponsored research projects or in MIT programs using significant MIT funds or facilities or those inventions developed pursuant to a written agreement with MIT..." I got RickRolled as soon as arriving to the page. :-)
- folkrav 4y ago
  I don't get it.
  - _gabe_ 4y ago
    This is from the MIT license, which is the school he's doing research for (emphasis mine): > Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so His TOS is literally the antithesis to the free nature of the MIT license :)
    - 15ai 4y ago
      This is my fault. I do see how that part is worded ambiguously (I'll fix it later), but I have not been with MIT in years. Copy pasting what I've written in another comment: To clarify: I have not been with MIT in years. I was paid the minimum hourly rate (roughly $14 an hour) to work on a related project during my undergraduate years, which eventually evolved into this project years down the road. (In fact, I had to pay for my own compute to get my work started - MIT never offered me any credits.) And to address the philosophy behind the MIT license (also copy pasted from another comment): For the past three years, I have done nothing but work on this project nonstop. I've been working on massive improvements (that some have pointed out in this thread) that I've been stuck on for the past several months, but I'm getting close to finishing that up. I don't feel comfortable publishing or releasing anything until I know for a fact that I can make no further improvements. It's not out of corporate greed or anything like that - I'm just really paranoid about getting out the best work possible.
claviska 4y ago
I appreciate the intent, and I understand that many people will do the wrong thing so this was probably an attempt to get such folks to actually read and adhere to the TOS, but the obnoxious consent dialog with a mandatory countdown turned me off. It’s probably not effective, either. On desktop, maybe I’d open dev tools and remove it. On mobile, I won’t be bothered. I hate that this is what the web has become and I choose to simply miss out on websites that behave this way.
- sophiebits 4y ago
  Weird, I read through the text because I care about how I’m allowed to use the things people are giving me – and by the time I got to the Accept button, it was enabled.
  - tesrx 4y ago
    I guess the creator added that specifically for the YouTubers and TikTokers who failed to credit the site: https://twitter.com/fifteenai/status/1522289980420337666 https://twitter.com/fifteenai/status/1522289980420337666
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - daniel_iversen 4y ago
    Same here. And I figured if a hobby project had such a disclaimer it would be important and so I was interested to read what the rules were. But how spoiled and precious are we all today when we can’t even read a few paragraphs and accept some terms to be able to try something cool for free!
    - what-imright 4y ago
      it kind of sucks, not accurate or convincing. if they spent less time making the disclaimer and more on the product… Reminds me of the 90s when everyone had a secret weapon IP in the making, until open source showed by example how futile and silly that approach was. You want people to use your work, because then they need you.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
apeace 4y ago
Kind of off-topic but... I clicked the "Random sample text" button and was given this: > OOPSIE WOOPSIE! Uwu. We made a fucky wucky! A wittle fucko boingo! I was a bit taken aback because I'd never seen this meme before. So I looked it up and I found the origins of it pretty funny: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-woopsie https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-woopsie Also, hearing the voice of Spongebob saying that really brightened my day. Bravo, MIT.
esjeon 4y ago
Very interesting. How does this thing work? TTS engine tuned with learning?
fny 4y ago
The use of emojis to determine sentiment is incredibly clever. > The DeepThroat model is able to generate voices of varying degrees of emotion despite never having been exposed to emotive data of the character during training. Furthermore, multiple characters can be trained simultaneously, significantly reducing the amount of time required compared to if one were to train the character models individually. Can't wait to read the paper.
- faitswulff 4y ago
  That's interesting, I wonder if it can account for any drifts in meaning across generations: https://www.wsj.com/articles/sending-a-smiley-face-make-sure-you-know-what-youre-saying-11628522840 https://www.wsj.com/articles/sending-a-smiley-face-make-sure...
- mechanical-sen 4y ago
  The emoji thing was a 4chan discovery. As was the idea to use both Arpabet and English, rather than just one of the two.
VanTheBrand 4y ago
The disclaimer is a little ironic considering the site owner doesn’t own the model (MIT does) and doesn’t own the training data (the various shows and games do)
- deeplearner1 4y ago
  MIT doesn’t own the model, where did you get that idea from? If you read through the website, it says that the developer alone owns everything related to the project, and the only funding he received from MIT was a small amount from the beginning. It’s really strange reading these ignorant comments from HN…
- 15ai 4y ago
  I'm sorry to tell you that I do, in fact, own my own model. I have not been with MIT in years.
rglover 4y ago
Had way too much fun making Spongebob say disgusting things.
thow34wqway 4y ago
How is this useful? They dont share code. Waste of time
peterlk 4y ago
I have no involvement in either of these companies, but I'll mention that this seems like a beta version of uberduck. Personally, I think uberdurk is awesome, and probably worth a look
s3p 4y ago
Unrelated, but years ago iOS used a new ML voice for Siri. It was quickly abused by people who found out how easy it was to make her say weird things [1]. Just by repeating the same character over and over again, she made weird sighs and other noises. Seems this AI has the same 'problem'. lol [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb5eHXavk34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb5eHXavk34 Edit: more links because this made me laugh way more than it should have https://youtu.be/zIUiOUGiB7s?t=6 https://youtu.be/zIUiOUGiB7s?t=6 https://youtu.be/0VovEGbYsI4?t=41 https://youtu.be/0VovEGbYsI4?t=41
15ai 4y ago
Hello. I made this. I'm a bit shocked at how many people are getting things wrong and taking things out of context, so perhaps I could answer some questions. To clarify: I have not been with MIT in years. I was paid the minimum hourly rate (roughly $14 an hour) to work on a related project during my undergraduate years, which eventually evolved into this project years down the road. (In fact, I had to pay for my own compute to get my work started - MIT never offered me any credits.) Everything else has been paid out of pocket since then. Yes, it does indeed cost several thousands of dollars a month - that is not an exaggeration. This has been optimized so many times that the technology needs to improve first before I can cut down on costs. The timer in the "TOS" was put there in hopes that people could understand where I was coming from in regards to misappropriating this kind of research. I did not expect people to get this riled up over a 10 second timer. (Especially not on Hacker News, of all places...) Edit: I suppose it makes sense to include other information in this post so that others don't have to go hunting for my comments in this thread: - >This is unrelated but what's with the fascination with HN users and My Little Pony? I've noticed this on a lot of posts in the past few months. - Twilight Sparkle's voice is indispensable in getting emotional contextualizers to work properly. The logo and profile picture is an homage to that fact. - >But seriously: how did you get the domain `15.ai`? - I purchased it. It was definitely not cheap. - >They named their tts "Deep Throat"? Why would you? - It was a suggestion from a Twitter user, and I found it clever. - >I heavily doubt it's "several thousands of dollars"... - It is indeed several thousands of dollars a month. I can show you AWS invoices, if you're skeptical. Just send me an email and I'd be happy to show proof. - >The disclaimer is a little ironic considering the site owner doesn’t own the model (MIT does) and doesn’t own the training data (the various shows and games do) - I'm sorry to tell you that I do, in fact, own my own model. I have not been with MIT in years.
- deeplearner1 4y ago
  Do you still plan to publish your research in a paper?
  - 15ai 4y ago
    Yes, I do. For the past three years, I have done nothing but work on this project nonstop. I've been working on massive improvements (that some have pointed out in this thread) that I've been stuck on for the past several months, but I'm getting close to finishing that up. I don't feel comfortable publishing or releasing anything until I know for a fact that I can make no further improvements. It's not out of corporate greed or anything like that - I'm just really paranoid about getting out the best work possible.
kettleballroll 4y ago
Site doesn't work on Firefox with noscript enabled because you can't get passed the ToS dialog (the 10 second timer never ends)
encryptluks2 4y ago
Would be hilarious if Google deranks their site and bans their YouTube for redirecting you to a Rick Roll YouTube video for rejecting their terms.
joshxyz 4y ago
> DeepThroat (/ˈdēpˌTHrōt/): Natural emotive high-fidelity text-to-speech synthesis with minimal viable data Shut up and take my money.
ausbah 4y ago
shouldn't there be a more descriptive title for this
Akronymus 4y ago
Is there a way to retrieve a list of all the possible random sample texts? I tried going through the JS, but vue is too confusing for my small brain.
- jordanwallwork 4y ago
  Just search the source for one of the random texts, they're all just there in an array
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    Oh, thanks I must've missed it.
dunefox 4y ago
Redirecting to a YouTube video playing "never gonna give you up" after rejecting cookies...
- foleac 4y ago
  I suggest you read what you rejected.
  - dunefox 4y ago
    It seems I have been conditioned by cookie laws.
Communitivity 4y ago
Bravo, nice work! One thing I noticed experimenting with it, questions don't have the typical rise in pitch at the end of a question in English.
0xedd 4y ago
Amazing and inspiring. Hat's off to you.
klankbrouwerij 4y ago
Nice work! Has anybody compared this to TorToiSe [1] ? [1] https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts

536 points by memorable 4y ago

First randomly generated text was "Have you read your SICP today?" Brings back fond memories of /prog/ and all its nonsense. Praise The Sussman!

15ai 4y ago
To be honest, I thought more people on HN would appreciate the little in-jokes that I added to the website (such as the Interjection copypasta and the multiple Rickrolls hidden throughout), but it's nice to see that some people do still share my lame attempt at humor :)

kybernetyk 4y ago

meh/10

darkerside 4y ago

Unfortunately, I guess I've reached the stage of my life where there are only three choices I actually would recognize out of the entire selection

kellymore 4y ago

Are you open to talking about your research and how devs can go about building something like this from scratch? How can people best connect with you?

armchairhacker 4y ago

This is really cool. It's a text-to-speech and the gist seems to be that they synthesize it from only a little audio. The results are clearly synthetic and need work. However what's cool is that there are a ton of characters (from popular shows and video games) and there are useful statistics like inferred emotion (which is also in the output). Honestly it's a big problem how a lot of AIs are like "black boxes" where you really can't customize or see anything. Yeah we have DALL-E and GPT which can generate text images but the lack of customization or fine-tuning the image afterwards severely hinders what's possible with them. Ultimately what you want is something interactive, where you can control how much or little the AI generates, and give it really specific criterion. But seriously: how did you get the domain `15.ai`?

marcofatica 4y ago
> But seriously: how did you get the domain `15.ai`? it's an MIT project so I'm sure that was a factor
- paulsutter 4y ago
  .ai domains cost a couple hundred bucks a year so domains are very available / not widely used by domain squatters (Its the country domain for the island of Anguilla, pop 15,000)
  - mfkp 4y ago
    $65/year on Porkbun, not terrible.
jamal-kumar 4y ago
I just used it to make spongebob squarepants say bad things.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  This thing synthesizes dolphin squeaks? Wow!
Deritio 4y ago
Dall-E 2 has customization. You can remove or add things etc. And for GPT you can also specify more details. Only a question of time until you can work with the ai on your art/thing. There are ai models which keep track of context and others which generate a plan of actions. AI is not a blackbox
- sterlind 4y ago
  OpenAI itself is a black box. Until I can reproduce their models or download them myself, and have unfettered access to them, it's just gatekept magic behind an API. So much for democratizing machine learning.

jason2323 4y ago

Hah! If you click on reject on the cookies window it rickrolls[1] you! [1]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rick%20Roll https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rick%20Roll

capelio 4y ago
Except that wasn’t a cookies acceptance window…
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Those 2 comments sum up the web in 2022

WalterGR 4y ago

If anyone is curious, the previous submission of this was popular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25654118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25654118

hojjat12000 4y ago

They named their tts "Deep Throat"? Why would you?

Bytewave81 4y ago
They knew.
latenightcoding 4y ago
bronnies
xdennis 4y ago
It could be a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Throat_(Watergate) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Throat_(Watergate)
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  to the DeepFoo pattern in deep learning naming, more likely.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    Why not both at once?
    - mgdlbp 4y ago
      Sill nothing to top 'DeepCreamPy' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29737049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29737049
      - mgdlbp 4y ago
        All six contiguous subsequences of the three tokens have meaning: - Deep, because it's deep-learning based - Cream, referring to its pornographic application - Py, as it's written in Python - DeepCream is close to DeepDream - CreamPy is homophonic to creampie - As a whole, homophonous to deep creampie, a meaningful pairing of noun and adjective

eljimmy 4y ago

This is unrelated but what's with the fascination with HN users and My Little Pony? I've noticed this on a lot of posts in the past few months.

crooked-v 4y ago
It's basically the same as unironic appreciation of various child-targeted-but-adult-friendly 'slice of life' anime, just more incongruous-seeming because of the 'pony' thing.
- astrange 4y ago
  Slice of life anime are targeted to college students and usually air too late at night for kids to catch them.
drblue 4y ago
Friendship is Magic was a legitimately good show. (Or at least Season 1 and 2 were).
loves_mangoes 4y ago
A lot of people in or around tech are furries, are into things like japanese animation, or are into My Little Pony. I don't consider myself one, but people often jokingly say that furries run the Internet. And it's not really specific to HN. For instance you have well-known people in the community who do vaccine R&D, or cryptography, or contribute to the C/C++ standards at ISO, or several other STEM things that are pretty outspoken about their interests. This is made more obvious on Twitter, where people tend to blur their personal and work identities a lot.
btown 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony:_Friendship_Is_Magic_fandom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony:_Friendship_Is_... explains in detail - between 2010 and ~2015 there was a massive overlap between millennial geek culture and unironic fandom of the rebooted My Little Pony show, especially among millennial men. One dedicated fan hub averaged almost 400k page views per day over its first 3.5 years of existence. And throughout it all, programming projects abounded, such as the delightful FiM++ esoteric language (https://esolangs.org/wiki/FiM%2B%2B https://esolangs.org/wiki/FiM%2B%2B) styled after the show's framing device. For many in tech now, it was an inescapable part of internet culture of the early 2010s, and a fond memory for many.

convery 4y ago

Interesting how it seems like there's little correlation between source sample-size and quality. e.g. the Portal Sentry turret at 1.5min input vs the 100+ minutes of the narrator from Stanly Parable which sounded like auto-tune had a stroke.

crooked-v 4y ago
Much of it depends on refinement work on each specific model. Try the Daria voices, for example, which are easy to get results with that sound like they came straight out of the show.
jeroenhd 4y ago
The AI seems to work best on high-pitched, female voices. The model seems to have improved in this regard since I last tried this website, but it's still very significantly biased towards female voices it seems.
esjeon 4y ago
I think it's because the underlying(?) TTS can't really portrait how the narrator speaks, which is very exaggerating and highly varying in tempo. The key idea of the app should be that we can easily transform "voice AND emotional tone" of the underlying voice.

ntoskrnl 4y ago

The Chell voice from Portal is extremely accurate

BeFlatXIII 4y ago
How does she compare to the Gordon Freeman model?
blooalien 4y ago
100% accurate to be precise. ;)
- deathanatos 4y ago
  I think that depends on whether you subscribe to Chell not having a voice, or having a voice and simply not using it. The game is silent on whether Chell can't talk, or simply has nothing to say to the AI around her.
  - fdschonborn 4y ago
    IIRC the official explanation of why Chell is silent through the games is that she's just _really_ pissed all the time.

lagrange77 4y ago

I only get white noise after trying several inputs. Alignment Confidence > 80%

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nope96 4y ago

Oh god, 50 shades of SpongePants. The future is wild in ways I never imagined. Star Trek style holodecks in what, 15 years? So, creepy thought: should we be recording audio of our parents, so we can still "hear from them" once in a while after they die? People are going to want to reconstruct their lost loved ones with AI. This project seems to imply you only need an hour or so of audio.

Engineering-MD 4y ago
There is a black mirror episode about this which then extends into a whole robotic replacement for a lost loved one. As with all black mirror episodes, it’s pretty dystopian.
batch12 4y ago
After my dad died, we found that he had recorded every phone call he had with us. I thought about doing this combined with text generation to create plausible prompts but never got the guts to go through with it. He wouldn't care if I had done it, but it wouldn't ease the guilt from years of sighs and rolling my eyes when he called at always the wrong times.
- gridspy 4y ago
  There is a great story of this - the creation of a "DadBot" https://www.wired.com/story/a-sons-race-to-give-his-dying-father-artificial-immortality/ https://www.wired.com/story/a-sons-race-to-give-his-dying-fa...
rockemsockem 4y ago
Sounds like a pretty unhealthy thing to do TBH :/
Tade0 4y ago
> So, creepy thought: should we be recording audio of our parents, so we can still "hear from them" once in a while after they die? Wouldn't do it for me. My mother is an artist and makes the most outlandish connections between seemingly unrelated topics on a regular basis.

deeplearner1 4y ago

If you want more information about 15.ai, I highly suggest reading their Wikipedia article! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15.ai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15.ai The whole history behind the project is fascinating: 4chan had a huge role in its development, and the project's work was stolen by an NFT company that a famous voice actor endorsed not too long ago.

julianeon 4y ago
Ah, I was wondering why they were so concerned about attribution. The truth is that, today, if I was going to use a tool to generate voices (say for YouTube), I wouldn't necessarily pick a small SaaS tool. I'd use Amazon Polly or some other GCP-style platform voice creation tool. There are already a few products in the space, and their costs are so low as to be almost negligible (example: Polly, 5 million characters free). For a commercial project, I could probably stay on a free tier for a whole year. With Dall*E, it seems like the only option, and it's such a superior option that a website could abuse it for commercial profits. But for voice synthesis, it's already dirt cheap and commercially available without limitations.
- gwern 4y ago
  15-kun has always been fanatical about attribution; the plagiarism just made him more so.
- rockemsockem 4y ago
  Polly and GCP's voices still sound a tad robotic though unfortunately :/ 15.ai seems to beat them on some sentences, but not all. Looking forward to the day when we can have real human-level quality of voices on-demand.

forrestthewoods 4y ago

The copyright laws around this are fascinating. They're adamant it must be non-commercial, they must be credited, and it can't be mixed with any other generated content. Meanwhile their content is exclusively derived from popular commercial products. Oh and they also make money via Patreon donations. I dunno. Feels a little gross to me. Eventually there is going to be a big copyright case about a model trained with copyrighted material. I have no idea how that will be resolved. Or maybe there will simply be new laws passed to make it either explicitly ok or explicitly not ok.

deeplearner1 4y ago
“Make money”? The creator loses several thousands of dollars a month hosting the site, and it’s done for free. The Patreon donations are all voluntary and only offer a pittance to the developer. I highly suggest reading into the project first. The Wiki article I linked before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15.ai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15.ai) answers all of your questions about copyright infringement.
- forrestthewoods 4y ago
  Feel free to replace "make money" with "collect revenue". This is currently a research project (with funding). However it's long-term goal is to achieve commercial quality voice acting and dubbing. It could be given away for free, sold directly, sold downstream, sold indirectly, or otherwise generate commercial value. In terms of copyright infringement, your wiki link answers nothing. A court ruled that Google could use copyrighted book text to train an algorithm to improve search results because the copying was highly transformative and did not serve as a market substitute to the original work. Meanwhile 15.ai is using copyrighted voice recordings to train an algorithm to synthesize new voice recordings that sound like they came from the original speaker. This is radically different from the Google case. Just because one instance of using copyrighted material to train an algorithm qualifies as fair use does not mean that all use of copyright material to train any algorithm also qualifies as fair use. There is absolutely nothing about this that is settled law. In the next 20 years there are going to be lots of lawsuits, lots of settlements, possibly a few rulings, and maybe even a few new laws. I find the whole topic very interesting. YMMV.

layer8 4y ago

Well that is one shitty ToS dialog.

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s-xyz 4y ago

The DeepThroat model? Sounds familiar…

quickthrower2 4y ago

What is the tldr. Got a wall of terms of service I didn’t want to agree too and clicking reject was a Rickroll.

vehemenz 4y ago

That's a lot of SpongeBob and My Little Pony characters. At this point, is it fair to say the attachment to kids' cartoons is a cultural (or pathological) phenomenon for under 30s?

_gabe_ 4y ago

> All code and models used for this website were written and trained as part of my research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The code and models are privately owned and are not to be sold or distributed for unauthorized use. Does anybody else find the irony in this statement absolutely amazing lol.

belter 4y ago
https://tlo.mit.edu/learn-about-intellectual-property/ownership#:~:text=MIT%20owns%20inventions%20made%20or,a%20written%20agreement%20with%20MIT https://tlo.mit.edu/learn-about-intellectual-property/owners.... "...MIT owns inventions made or created by MIT faculty, students, staff, and others participating in sponsored research projects or in MIT programs using significant MIT funds or facilities or those inventions developed pursuant to a written agreement with MIT..." I got RickRolled as soon as arriving to the page. :-)
folkrav 4y ago
I don't get it.
- _gabe_ 4y ago
  This is from the MIT license, which is the school he's doing research for (emphasis mine): > Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so His TOS is literally the antithesis to the free nature of the MIT license :)
  - 15ai 4y ago
    This is my fault. I do see how that part is worded ambiguously (I'll fix it later), but I have not been with MIT in years. Copy pasting what I've written in another comment: To clarify: I have not been with MIT in years. I was paid the minimum hourly rate (roughly $14 an hour) to work on a related project during my undergraduate years, which eventually evolved into this project years down the road. (In fact, I had to pay for my own compute to get my work started - MIT never offered me any credits.) And to address the philosophy behind the MIT license (also copy pasted from another comment): For the past three years, I have done nothing but work on this project nonstop. I've been working on massive improvements (that some have pointed out in this thread) that I've been stuck on for the past several months, but I'm getting close to finishing that up. I don't feel comfortable publishing or releasing anything until I know for a fact that I can make no further improvements. It's not out of corporate greed or anything like that - I'm just really paranoid about getting out the best work possible.

claviska 4y ago

I appreciate the intent, and I understand that many people will do the wrong thing so this was probably an attempt to get such folks to actually read and adhere to the TOS, but the obnoxious consent dialog with a mandatory countdown turned me off. It’s probably not effective, either. On desktop, maybe I’d open dev tools and remove it. On mobile, I won’t be bothered. I hate that this is what the web has become and I choose to simply miss out on websites that behave this way.

sophiebits 4y ago
Weird, I read through the text because I care about how I’m allowed to use the things people are giving me – and by the time I got to the Accept button, it was enabled.
- tesrx 4y ago
  I guess the creator added that specifically for the YouTubers and TikTokers who failed to credit the site: https://twitter.com/fifteenai/status/1522289980420337666 https://twitter.com/fifteenai/status/1522289980420337666
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- daniel_iversen 4y ago
  Same here. And I figured if a hobby project had such a disclaimer it would be important and so I was interested to read what the rules were. But how spoiled and precious are we all today when we can’t even read a few paragraphs and accept some terms to be able to try something cool for free!
  - what-imright 4y ago
    it kind of sucks, not accurate or convincing. if they spent less time making the disclaimer and more on the product… Reminds me of the 90s when everyone had a secret weapon IP in the making, until open source showed by example how futile and silly that approach was. You want people to use your work, because then they need you.

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apeace 4y ago

Kind of off-topic but... I clicked the "Random sample text" button and was given this: > OOPSIE WOOPSIE! Uwu. We made a fucky wucky! A wittle fucko boingo! I was a bit taken aback because I'd never seen this meme before. So I looked it up and I found the origins of it pretty funny: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-woopsie https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-woopsie Also, hearing the voice of Spongebob saying that really brightened my day. Bravo, MIT.

esjeon 4y ago

Very interesting. How does this thing work? TTS engine tuned with learning?

fny 4y ago

The use of emojis to determine sentiment is incredibly clever. > The DeepThroat model is able to generate voices of varying degrees of emotion despite never having been exposed to emotive data of the character during training. Furthermore, multiple characters can be trained simultaneously, significantly reducing the amount of time required compared to if one were to train the character models individually. Can't wait to read the paper.

faitswulff 4y ago
That's interesting, I wonder if it can account for any drifts in meaning across generations: https://www.wsj.com/articles/sending-a-smiley-face-make-sure-you-know-what-youre-saying-11628522840 https://www.wsj.com/articles/sending-a-smiley-face-make-sure...
mechanical-sen 4y ago
The emoji thing was a 4chan discovery. As was the idea to use both Arpabet and English, rather than just one of the two.

VanTheBrand 4y ago

The disclaimer is a little ironic considering the site owner doesn’t own the model (MIT does) and doesn’t own the training data (the various shows and games do)

deeplearner1 4y ago
MIT doesn’t own the model, where did you get that idea from? If you read through the website, it says that the developer alone owns everything related to the project, and the only funding he received from MIT was a small amount from the beginning. It’s really strange reading these ignorant comments from HN…
15ai 4y ago
I'm sorry to tell you that I do, in fact, own my own model. I have not been with MIT in years.

rglover 4y ago

Had way too much fun making Spongebob say disgusting things.

thow34wqway 4y ago

How is this useful? They dont share code. Waste of time

peterlk 4y ago

I have no involvement in either of these companies, but I'll mention that this seems like a beta version of uberduck. Personally, I think uberdurk is awesome, and probably worth a look

s3p 4y ago

Unrelated, but years ago iOS used a new ML voice for Siri. It was quickly abused by people who found out how easy it was to make her say weird things [1]. Just by repeating the same character over and over again, she made weird sighs and other noises. Seems this AI has the same 'problem'. lol [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb5eHXavk34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb5eHXavk34 Edit: more links because this made me laugh way more than it should have https://youtu.be/zIUiOUGiB7s?t=6 https://youtu.be/zIUiOUGiB7s?t=6 https://youtu.be/0VovEGbYsI4?t=41 https://youtu.be/0VovEGbYsI4?t=41

15ai 4y ago

Hello. I made this. I'm a bit shocked at how many people are getting things wrong and taking things out of context, so perhaps I could answer some questions. To clarify: I have not been with MIT in years. I was paid the minimum hourly rate (roughly $14 an hour) to work on a related project during my undergraduate years, which eventually evolved into this project years down the road. (In fact, I had to pay for my own compute to get my work started - MIT never offered me any credits.) Everything else has been paid out of pocket since then. Yes, it does indeed cost several thousands of dollars a month - that is not an exaggeration. This has been optimized so many times that the technology needs to improve first before I can cut down on costs. The timer in the "TOS" was put there in hopes that people could understand where I was coming from in regards to misappropriating this kind of research. I did not expect people to get this riled up over a 10 second timer. (Especially not on Hacker News, of all places...) Edit: I suppose it makes sense to include other information in this post so that others don't have to go hunting for my comments in this thread: - >This is unrelated but what's with the fascination with HN users and My Little Pony? I've noticed this on a lot of posts in the past few months. - Twilight Sparkle's voice is indispensable in getting emotional contextualizers to work properly. The logo and profile picture is an homage to that fact. - >But seriously: how did you get the domain `15.ai`? - I purchased it. It was definitely not cheap. - >They named their tts "Deep Throat"? Why would you? - It was a suggestion from a Twitter user, and I found it clever. - >I heavily doubt it's "several thousands of dollars"... - It is indeed several thousands of dollars a month. I can show you AWS invoices, if you're skeptical. Just send me an email and I'd be happy to show proof. - >The disclaimer is a little ironic considering the site owner doesn’t own the model (MIT does) and doesn’t own the training data (the various shows and games do) - I'm sorry to tell you that I do, in fact, own my own model. I have not been with MIT in years.

deeplearner1 4y ago
Do you still plan to publish your research in a paper?
- 15ai 4y ago
  Yes, I do. For the past three years, I have done nothing but work on this project nonstop. I've been working on massive improvements (that some have pointed out in this thread) that I've been stuck on for the past several months, but I'm getting close to finishing that up. I don't feel comfortable publishing or releasing anything until I know for a fact that I can make no further improvements. It's not out of corporate greed or anything like that - I'm just really paranoid about getting out the best work possible.

kettleballroll 4y ago

Site doesn't work on Firefox with noscript enabled because you can't get passed the ToS dialog (the 10 second timer never ends)

encryptluks2 4y ago

Would be hilarious if Google deranks their site and bans their YouTube for redirecting you to a Rick Roll YouTube video for rejecting their terms.

joshxyz 4y ago

> DeepThroat (/ˈdēpˌTHrōt/): Natural emotive high-fidelity text-to-speech synthesis with minimal viable data Shut up and take my money.

ausbah 4y ago

shouldn't there be a more descriptive title for this

Akronymus 4y ago

Is there a way to retrieve a list of all the possible random sample texts? I tried going through the JS, but vue is too confusing for my small brain.

jordanwallwork 4y ago
Just search the source for one of the random texts, they're all just there in an array
- Akronymus 4y ago
  Oh, thanks I must've missed it.

dunefox 4y ago

Redirecting to a YouTube video playing "never gonna give you up" after rejecting cookies...

foleac 4y ago
I suggest you read what you rejected.
- dunefox 4y ago
  It seems I have been conditioned by cookie laws.

Communitivity 4y ago

Bravo, nice work! One thing I noticed experimenting with it, questions don't have the typical rise in pitch at the end of a question in English.

0xedd 4y ago

Amazing and inspiring. Hat's off to you.

klankbrouwerij 4y ago

Nice work! Has anybody compared this to TorToiSe [1] ? [1] https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts