8 ms·

Wow, people who lose their voice could basically talk again through text to speech as long as they have previous recordings or themselves. Or text messages tha

Wow, people who lose their voice could basically talk again through text to speech as long as they have previous recordings or themselves. Or text messages that you can listen to in the voice of the people who sent them. Or the death of the audiobook business? Any book read in any voice you want. Or maybe a form of extreme compression, voice is converted to text with Whisper, sent over the wire as text, and re-created with the same voice on the receiver. Or train it with the voice of the computer from TNG, pair it with ChatGPT and now I have the perfect digital assistant.

richardw 4y ago
Crooks and fraudsters will have a field day. “Hi dad this is Sally. I need some money.” … “Sure, listen can you just reset my password. This thing has driven me nuts.”
- d110af5ccf 4y ago
  This has already been happening (custom voice models of a target the purpose of fraud) for (at least) the past couple of years. It just keeps getting easier and more efficient.
JellyBeanThief 4y ago
Well though of, Dr. Urquhart > Ethan wondered rather fearfully if Cee were reading his mind right now-apparently not, for the Cetagandan expatriate gave no sign of realizing his mistake yet. > "I take it," said Ethan, "that your powers are intermittent." > "Yes," replied Cee. "If my escape to Athos had gone as I'd originally planned, I meant never to use them again. I suppose your government will demand my services as the price of its protection, now." > "I-I don't know," answered Ethan honestly. "But if you truly possess such a talent, it would seem a shame not to use it. I mean, one can see the applications right away." > "Can't one, though," muttered Cee bitterly. > "Look at pediatric medicine-what a diagnostic aid for pre-verbal patients! Babies who can't answer, Where does it hurt? What does it feel like? Or for stroke victims or those paralyzed in accidents who have lost all ability to communicate, trapped in their bodies. God the Father," Ethan's enthusiasm mounted, "you could be an absolute savior!"
tnzk 4y ago
I'm excited by most of inspiration you shared, but > Or the death of the audiobook business? Any book read in any voice you want. Listeing to audiobooks read in my own voice? Oh no...
- throwaway14356 4y ago
  in the future all work will be done by fembots, we will have flying cars and in every movie ever made ur mum is the hero.
raidicy 4y ago
I have essentially lost the use of my voice and can no longer use it musically. I have some decent quality recordings I could provide and would be happy if this could be a substitute.
- larsiusprime 4y ago
  Synthesizer V Pro is a really interesting tool that does something similar to this. Right now it has very limited voice banks, but the ones they have are pretty crazy in their capabilities. https://store.dreamtonics.com/product/solaria-voice-database/ https://store.dreamtonics.com/product/solaria-voice-database... (Of course right now you can only use voice banks they've pre-trained, but I bet in a few years you could fine tune it on recordings of your own voice)
  - raidicy 4y ago
    Thank you for the suggestion and reply. But honestly if it's not my voice I don't know if I would want to use it. I considered writing stuff and hiring a vocalist but I'd have to write things for them. I feel I'd also have to do the same thing with a vocal synthesizer. > I bet in a few years you could fine tune it on recordings of your own voice Something to keep an eye out for though.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  My condolences, that must have been hard if you were a lot into singing...
ec109685 4y ago
Apple has built extremely good audio book synthesis: https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-audiobooks https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-aud...
- gcanyon 4y ago
  I hadn't heard those voices before -- those are extraordinary.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    The female voices for sure, but the male voices have the same problem other voice synthesis AI has: the lower the voice, the more digital and fake the sound likes. The fragment for "Jackson" has a very clear robotic distortion about 10 or 12 seconds in, for example. Madison and Helena are better, though they have weird pacing issues. I couldn't stand to listen to these voices for a long time. With how good 15.ai's female voices are (when they come out with new versions), I must say I expected better.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  This has been available in Google Play Books since 2020 in beta and 2022 for any publisher. For a while now, the store has had a large selection of free auto-narrated books whose copyright has expired. As adequate as it is, publishers still pay for real human narrators for bestsellers. https://9to5google.com/2020/12/03/google-auto-audiobook/ https://9to5google.com/2020/12/03/google-auto-audiobook/ https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/audio-books/article/89151-google-play-books-expands-ai-audiobook-narration.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/a... https://support.google.com/books/partner/table/10957334?hl=en https://support.google.com/books/partner/table/10957334?hl=e...
- perryizgr8 4y ago
  > Once your request is submitted, it takes one to two months to process the book and conduct quality checks. This is not realtime speech to text as we think of it generally.
aardvarkr 4y ago
And don’t forget spammers and scammers that sounds like sweet midwestern grandma’s. Sorry to be a buzz kill but it’s important to recognize the drawbacks too as we continue to move forward.
- bottlepalm 4y ago
  I think long term it will push signed communication channels. As you're only getting voice/text messages from numbers that are signed by your family and friends. People already are not answering the phone from people they don't know. That trend will accelerate until it becomes the default on all devices.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Yeah, but I do listen to voicemail that people leave me, with the assumption that if they spent the effort to do so, it must be important. I am scared now that this won't work any more, and it seems like here the drawback heavily outweigh the benefits...
    - ben_w 4y ago
      I'm not sure when I last got real, rather than scam, voice mail.
      - BlueTemplar 4y ago
        Interesting, IIRC I never got spam voice mail... I wonder if there's some legal differences that might explain this ?
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      All my VM is spam now. I've told everyone I know (not many people!) that I hate VM, and don't usually answer it - certainly not promptly. I do usually check the missed-calls list, and call back. I never leave VM; I hang up when the robot starts talking. The point of a phone is immediate, synchronous, person-to-person voice communication. VM comprehensively defeats that. You might as well write a letter.
jes5199 4y ago
AI-as-extreme-compression seems like a subfield with a lot of fascinating applications. Kinda like how MP3 used a perceptual model to define what sounds were least important, AI compression could have a conceptual model of what features were least important
- gcanyon 4y ago
  I think I've commented on this in the past here. Once you accept non-lossless compression, there's always a trade-off between compression efficiency and fidelity to the original. We're not yet to the point where ET can be compressed as, "a movie about an innocent alien stranded on Earth who gets help from some kids to contact his people for rescue," but we're not too far away from it, either.
  - KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
    You can already do this with existing large language models, as long as the entire script can fit into their context vector layer.
    - bobkazamakis 4y ago
      still wrong; can't best information theory yet.
      - KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
        If you want to squeeze it into one sentence, obviously it will be lossy. That's the whole point of summarization.
Salgat 4y ago
I can see voice actors selling the rights to their voice on a case by case basis.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  their value will drop significantly anyway if the pool of voice actors is extended to millions of voices.
- Tepix 4y ago
  But it's trivial to clone their voice without their consent or their knowledge.
rcthompson 4y ago
> compression Remember those Xerox scanners that randomly changed numbers and letters around, because the compression algorithm sometimes thought a 0 looked a bit too much like an 8 and got them mixed up? I can't wait until that starts happening for spoken words. Even in the examples demonstrated here you can hear quite a few flubbed lines.
- kenniskrag 4y ago
  and here the video: https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0 https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0
onion2k 4y ago
people who lose their voice could basically talk again through text to speech as long as they have previous recordings or themselves I worked with someone who used a Stephen Hawking style voice application for a while. Its really weird having a conversation with someone like that. There's a delay between everything people say. It's a lot like using IRC on a really laggy connection. I quite enjoyed talking to him because everyone had time to think between while he 'typed'. The point is though, even if the sound his app used was a perfect recreation of his own voice it wouldn't be like talking again. It's a different experience.
- EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
  It's interesting to explore the possibility space of communication, isn't it? We all use just a handful of communication modes, but so many more are possible. Here's an old idea of mine as an example: "Hands-only interface between two anonymous strangers who cannot hear or see each other, only touch and optionally see each other's hands. The elimination of usual communication channels like speech, facial expressions and body language makes this a novel way of interaction." If the participants don't know any predefined sign languages, what kind of information or emotion could they convey to each other? I look forward to extended reality and AI opening up a lot of the possibility space of wholly new communication modes.
  - sockfightturnip 4y ago
    That idea featured briefly in the novel The Light of Other Days. Definitely worth a read.
    - bsenftner 4y ago
      That's quite the distant hook promoting what, I feel, is one of the more provocative novels ever written. It is a seminal book that should have more recognition.
    - spdustin 4y ago
      A criminally under-read book. I’ve recommended it to so many people.
Shorel 4y ago
Death of the low quality audiobook business. But for example, some Discworld audiobooks have very specific actors, and I would not change them for anyone else.
allisdust 4y ago
Or a dystopian paid chat bot that speaks in the voice of dead loved ones. Applications aren't all good unfortunately.
cs702 4y ago
Consider replacing "Or" with "And" in your comment, because none of these disruptions are mutually exclusive. All of them can and probably will happen simultaneously. Here are a few more, off the top of my head: * Video game characters will speak lines generated on-the-fly depending on in-game context, instead of lines pre-recorded by voice actors. Game makers can train LLMs to generate lines of dialogue for different characters given the state of the game, and have the characters speak those lines. * We will eventually see the death of voice acting in all its forms -- video games, cartoons, advertisements, etc. Inevitably, we'll see famous actors and their legal representatives figuring out how to secure rights to their recognizable voices. * Spammers and criminals will start using familiar voices to con targets ("listen, I've been kidnapped while on vacation; please send the money now"). Sooner or later, dark-web hackers are going to harvest samples from everyone's shared video and audio clips at scale. * Videofakes are going to get a lot more realistic and interesting, with faked characters speaking just like the real ones. Famous actors and public figures should brace for the impact this technology will have on black-market uses, including (as always) pornography.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  I feel like it's easy to get swept up in the hype and forget that the "meta" aspects of a voice are still meaningful > * Video game characters will speak lines generated on-the-fly depending on in-game context, instead of lines pre-recorded by voice actors. Game makers can train LLMs to generate lines of dialogue for different characters given the state of the game, and have the characters speak those lines. We already have incredibly cheap voice acting relative to what products cost to develop. Yet companies willingly pay much much more for people who aren't even particularly good at voice acting, just for the star appeal. You can't copyright a voice, but celebs do have use of their voices for commercial gain protected by the right to publicity: https://www.inta.org/topics/right-of-publicity https://www.inta.org/topics/right-of-publicity > * Spammers and criminals will start using familiar voices to con targets ("listen, I've been kidnapped while on vacation; please send the money now"). Sooner or later, dark-web hackers are going to harvest samples from everyone's shared video and audio clips at scale. This still relies on vulnerable people since you didn't actually kidnap them and so you don't have a believable context for it if someone digs. In that way we already have "good enough" faking, and even if we had perfect fakes scammers wouldn't want to do that: you're much better off using poorly done fakes and having vulnerable people self-filter if they still fall for it (similar to spam emails intentionally using awful grammar and spelling > Videofakes are going to get a lot more realistic and interesting, with faked characters speaking just like the real ones. Famous actors and public figures Similar to the kidnapping example, you'd get less impact jumping to the level of a deepfake because you don't have a real chain of custody, you've given a concrete piece of evidence to be rebuked, etc. I've mentioned before, we live in a world where you can register americasrealnews23914.com, make up a completely baseless article about how <insert politician> admitted COVID is a hoax meant to enable a new world order, and gain traction with no real opposition since your claim is so outlandish that only the vulnerable population you're targeting will actually pay any attention to it. By being so much worse than perfect, you end up with a much more effective result
usrusr 4y ago
> Or train it with the voice of the computer from TNG, pair it with ChatGPT and now I have the perfect digital assistant. Apparently the project of keeping the voice of Majel Barrett around forever had already been started long before machine learning models became commonplace, so a generative ML model of her voice will surely be done in some way: https://mobile.twitter.com/roddenberry/status/772493204121944066 https://mobile.twitter.com/roddenberry/status/77249320412194... I wonder what this will mean for the profession of voice actors. That market will surely suffer hard from the stock-photo equivalent in voice models racing to the bottom, but if some sane default contract models emerge that are respectful to both sides perhaps custom recording can remain an attractive premium option: do tailored recording for the main items and allow extensions from a model derived from the initial set for a fee that's considerably lower than what would be appropriate for real, recorded extensions but not quite free forever included with the initial payout. Model-as-a-service could become quite a business opportunity because it would not just be about being good at taking a set of recordings and running the algorithms but also double as a trusted intermediary. Really depends on how cheap a service like that could operate.
woeirua 4y ago
> Or text messages that you can listen to in the voice of the people who sent them. Like voice snippets? We already have them. People don't want to use them. > Or the death of the audiobook business? Any book read in any voice you want. Press F to doubt. Human voice inflection is hard to mimic because you have to have a contextual understanding of what is being said, and what has been said in the story up to that time frame. No TTS model is capable of that today, and probably not for a long time. > Or maybe a form of extreme compression, voice is converted to text with Whisper, sent over the wire as text, and re-created with the same voice on the receiver. I don't understand the value prop here. The number of cases where you have access to the necessary computational resources, but _not_ adequate bandwidth is so small. The most likely use case is probably scamming. With a small snippet of someone's voice (for example, from answering a robo call) you can now synthesize a completely reasonable sounding phone call for conning people out of their money. By the way, this attack vector was _highly_ effective against the elderly even when the attackers voice sounded quite distinct from the individual that they were posing as. The elderly have no chance against this type of fraud. There is going to be big money in authenticating individuals so that phone calls, etc can happen between trusted parties.
- rafaelero 4y ago
  > Human voice inflection is hard to mimic because you have to have a contextual understanding of what is being said I think that's correct if we are talking about the author reading his book. But if we are using another person, they have no way to learn the correct vocalization other than using the text. And that's the same input data that the AI is dealing with, so it should be possible for them to be as good as non-authors reading the book.
  - monkpit 4y ago
    I disagree. In the case of audiobooks, a language model might be able to store context of the story similar to a reader, but a good reader/voice actor will be able to add emphasis or inflection to enhance the story - and decide to do so based upon the story itself. The AI won’t have understanding of the story itself to know what is appropriate or not. Also, you say only the author could read the story in a certain way. This kind of implies that all audiobook recordings are just 1 long take, with no direction. I am not an expert, but I would assume there’s some creative direction involved.

richardw 4y ago

Crooks and fraudsters will have a field day. “Hi dad this is Sally. I need some money.” … “Sure, listen can you just reset my password. This thing has driven me nuts.”

d110af5ccf 4y ago
This has already been happening (custom voice models of a target the purpose of fraud) for (at least) the past couple of years. It just keeps getting easier and more efficient.

JellyBeanThief 4y ago

Well though of, Dr. Urquhart > Ethan wondered rather fearfully if Cee were reading his mind right now-apparently not, for the Cetagandan expatriate gave no sign of realizing his mistake yet. > "I take it," said Ethan, "that your powers are intermittent." > "Yes," replied Cee. "If my escape to Athos had gone as I'd originally planned, I meant never to use them again. I suppose your government will demand my services as the price of its protection, now." > "I-I don't know," answered Ethan honestly. "But if you truly possess such a talent, it would seem a shame not to use it. I mean, one can see the applications right away." > "Can't one, though," muttered Cee bitterly. > "Look at pediatric medicine-what a diagnostic aid for pre-verbal patients! Babies who can't answer, Where does it hurt? What does it feel like? Or for stroke victims or those paralyzed in accidents who have lost all ability to communicate, trapped in their bodies. God the Father," Ethan's enthusiasm mounted, "you could be an absolute savior!"

tnzk 4y ago

I'm excited by most of inspiration you shared, but > Or the death of the audiobook business? Any book read in any voice you want. Listeing to audiobooks read in my own voice? Oh no...

throwaway14356 4y ago
in the future all work will be done by fembots, we will have flying cars and in every movie ever made ur mum is the hero.

raidicy 4y ago

I have essentially lost the use of my voice and can no longer use it musically. I have some decent quality recordings I could provide and would be happy if this could be a substitute.

larsiusprime 4y ago
Synthesizer V Pro is a really interesting tool that does something similar to this. Right now it has very limited voice banks, but the ones they have are pretty crazy in their capabilities. https://store.dreamtonics.com/product/solaria-voice-database/ https://store.dreamtonics.com/product/solaria-voice-database... (Of course right now you can only use voice banks they've pre-trained, but I bet in a few years you could fine tune it on recordings of your own voice)
- raidicy 4y ago
  Thank you for the suggestion and reply. But honestly if it's not my voice I don't know if I would want to use it. I considered writing stuff and hiring a vocalist but I'd have to write things for them. I feel I'd also have to do the same thing with a vocal synthesizer. > I bet in a few years you could fine tune it on recordings of your own voice Something to keep an eye out for though.
BlueTemplar 4y ago
My condolences, that must have been hard if you were a lot into singing...

ec109685 4y ago

Apple has built extremely good audio book synthesis: https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-audiobooks https://authors.apple.com/support/4519-digital-narration-aud...

gcanyon 4y ago
I hadn't heard those voices before -- those are extraordinary.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  The female voices for sure, but the male voices have the same problem other voice synthesis AI has: the lower the voice, the more digital and fake the sound likes. The fragment for "Jackson" has a very clear robotic distortion about 10 or 12 seconds in, for example. Madison and Helena are better, though they have weird pacing issues. I couldn't stand to listen to these voices for a long time. With how good 15.ai's female voices are (when they come out with new versions), I must say I expected better.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
This has been available in Google Play Books since 2020 in beta and 2022 for any publisher. For a while now, the store has had a large selection of free auto-narrated books whose copyright has expired. As adequate as it is, publishers still pay for real human narrators for bestsellers. https://9to5google.com/2020/12/03/google-auto-audiobook/ https://9to5google.com/2020/12/03/google-auto-audiobook/ https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/audio-books/article/89151-google-play-books-expands-ai-audiobook-narration.html https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/a... https://support.google.com/books/partner/table/10957334?hl=en https://support.google.com/books/partner/table/10957334?hl=e...
perryizgr8 4y ago
> Once your request is submitted, it takes one to two months to process the book and conduct quality checks. This is not realtime speech to text as we think of it generally.

aardvarkr 4y ago

And don’t forget spammers and scammers that sounds like sweet midwestern grandma’s. Sorry to be a buzz kill but it’s important to recognize the drawbacks too as we continue to move forward.

bottlepalm 4y ago
I think long term it will push signed communication channels. As you're only getting voice/text messages from numbers that are signed by your family and friends. People already are not answering the phone from people they don't know. That trend will accelerate until it becomes the default on all devices.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Yeah, but I do listen to voicemail that people leave me, with the assumption that if they spent the effort to do so, it must be important. I am scared now that this won't work any more, and it seems like here the drawback heavily outweigh the benefits...
  - ben_w 4y ago
    I'm not sure when I last got real, rather than scam, voice mail.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      Interesting, IIRC I never got spam voice mail... I wonder if there's some legal differences that might explain this ?
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    All my VM is spam now. I've told everyone I know (not many people!) that I hate VM, and don't usually answer it - certainly not promptly. I do usually check the missed-calls list, and call back. I never leave VM; I hang up when the robot starts talking. The point of a phone is immediate, synchronous, person-to-person voice communication. VM comprehensively defeats that. You might as well write a letter.

jes5199 4y ago

AI-as-extreme-compression seems like a subfield with a lot of fascinating applications. Kinda like how MP3 used a perceptual model to define what sounds were least important, AI compression could have a conceptual model of what features were least important

gcanyon 4y ago
I think I've commented on this in the past here. Once you accept non-lossless compression, there's always a trade-off between compression efficiency and fidelity to the original. We're not yet to the point where ET can be compressed as, "a movie about an innocent alien stranded on Earth who gets help from some kids to contact his people for rescue," but we're not too far away from it, either.
- KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
  You can already do this with existing large language models, as long as the entire script can fit into their context vector layer.
  - bobkazamakis 4y ago
    still wrong; can't best information theory yet.
    - KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
      If you want to squeeze it into one sentence, obviously it will be lossy. That's the whole point of summarization.

Salgat 4y ago

I can see voice actors selling the rights to their voice on a case by case basis.

ekianjo 4y ago
their value will drop significantly anyway if the pool of voice actors is extended to millions of voices.
Tepix 4y ago
But it's trivial to clone their voice without their consent or their knowledge.

rcthompson 4y ago

> compression Remember those Xerox scanners that randomly changed numbers and letters around, because the compression algorithm sometimes thought a 0 looked a bit too much like an 8 and got them mixed up? I can't wait until that starts happening for spoken words. Even in the examples demonstrated here you can hear quite a few flubbed lines.

kenniskrag 4y ago
and here the video: https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0 https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0

onion2k 4y ago

people who lose their voice could basically talk again through text to speech as long as they have previous recordings or themselves I worked with someone who used a Stephen Hawking style voice application for a while. Its really weird having a conversation with someone like that. There's a delay between everything people say. It's a lot like using IRC on a really laggy connection. I quite enjoyed talking to him because everyone had time to think between while he 'typed'. The point is though, even if the sound his app used was a perfect recreation of his own voice it wouldn't be like talking again. It's a different experience.

EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
It's interesting to explore the possibility space of communication, isn't it? We all use just a handful of communication modes, but so many more are possible. Here's an old idea of mine as an example: "Hands-only interface between two anonymous strangers who cannot hear or see each other, only touch and optionally see each other's hands. The elimination of usual communication channels like speech, facial expressions and body language makes this a novel way of interaction." If the participants don't know any predefined sign languages, what kind of information or emotion could they convey to each other? I look forward to extended reality and AI opening up a lot of the possibility space of wholly new communication modes.
- sockfightturnip 4y ago
  That idea featured briefly in the novel The Light of Other Days. Definitely worth a read.
  - bsenftner 4y ago
    That's quite the distant hook promoting what, I feel, is one of the more provocative novels ever written. It is a seminal book that should have more recognition.
  - spdustin 4y ago
    A criminally under-read book. I’ve recommended it to so many people.

Shorel 4y ago

Death of the low quality audiobook business. But for example, some Discworld audiobooks have very specific actors, and I would not change them for anyone else.

allisdust 4y ago

Or a dystopian paid chat bot that speaks in the voice of dead loved ones. Applications aren't all good unfortunately.

cs702 4y ago

Consider replacing "Or" with "And" in your comment, because none of these disruptions are mutually exclusive. All of them can and probably will happen simultaneously. Here are a few more, off the top of my head: * Video game characters will speak lines generated on-the-fly depending on in-game context, instead of lines pre-recorded by voice actors. Game makers can train LLMs to generate lines of dialogue for different characters given the state of the game, and have the characters speak those lines. * We will eventually see the death of voice acting in all its forms -- video games, cartoons, advertisements, etc. Inevitably, we'll see famous actors and their legal representatives figuring out how to secure rights to their recognizable voices. * Spammers and criminals will start using familiar voices to con targets ("listen, I've been kidnapped while on vacation; please send the money now"). Sooner or later, dark-web hackers are going to harvest samples from everyone's shared video and audio clips at scale. * Videofakes are going to get a lot more realistic and interesting, with faked characters speaking just like the real ones. Famous actors and public figures should brace for the impact this technology will have on black-market uses, including (as always) pornography.

BoorishBears 4y ago
I feel like it's easy to get swept up in the hype and forget that the "meta" aspects of a voice are still meaningful > * Video game characters will speak lines generated on-the-fly depending on in-game context, instead of lines pre-recorded by voice actors. Game makers can train LLMs to generate lines of dialogue for different characters given the state of the game, and have the characters speak those lines. We already have incredibly cheap voice acting relative to what products cost to develop. Yet companies willingly pay much much more for people who aren't even particularly good at voice acting, just for the star appeal. You can't copyright a voice, but celebs do have use of their voices for commercial gain protected by the right to publicity: https://www.inta.org/topics/right-of-publicity https://www.inta.org/topics/right-of-publicity > * Spammers and criminals will start using familiar voices to con targets ("listen, I've been kidnapped while on vacation; please send the money now"). Sooner or later, dark-web hackers are going to harvest samples from everyone's shared video and audio clips at scale. This still relies on vulnerable people since you didn't actually kidnap them and so you don't have a believable context for it if someone digs. In that way we already have "good enough" faking, and even if we had perfect fakes scammers wouldn't want to do that: you're much better off using poorly done fakes and having vulnerable people self-filter if they still fall for it (similar to spam emails intentionally using awful grammar and spelling > Videofakes are going to get a lot more realistic and interesting, with faked characters speaking just like the real ones. Famous actors and public figures Similar to the kidnapping example, you'd get less impact jumping to the level of a deepfake because you don't have a real chain of custody, you've given a concrete piece of evidence to be rebuked, etc. I've mentioned before, we live in a world where you can register americasrealnews23914.com, make up a completely baseless article about how <insert politician> admitted COVID is a hoax meant to enable a new world order, and gain traction with no real opposition since your claim is so outlandish that only the vulnerable population you're targeting will actually pay any attention to it. By being so much worse than perfect, you end up with a much more effective result

usrusr 4y ago

> Or train it with the voice of the computer from TNG, pair it with ChatGPT and now I have the perfect digital assistant. Apparently the project of keeping the voice of Majel Barrett around forever had already been started long before machine learning models became commonplace, so a generative ML model of her voice will surely be done in some way: https://mobile.twitter.com/roddenberry/status/772493204121944066 https://mobile.twitter.com/roddenberry/status/77249320412194... I wonder what this will mean for the profession of voice actors. That market will surely suffer hard from the stock-photo equivalent in voice models racing to the bottom, but if some sane default contract models emerge that are respectful to both sides perhaps custom recording can remain an attractive premium option: do tailored recording for the main items and allow extensions from a model derived from the initial set for a fee that's considerably lower than what would be appropriate for real, recorded extensions but not quite free forever included with the initial payout. Model-as-a-service could become quite a business opportunity because it would not just be about being good at taking a set of recordings and running the algorithms but also double as a trusted intermediary. Really depends on how cheap a service like that could operate.

woeirua 4y ago

> Or text messages that you can listen to in the voice of the people who sent them. Like voice snippets? We already have them. People don't want to use them. > Or the death of the audiobook business? Any book read in any voice you want. Press F to doubt. Human voice inflection is hard to mimic because you have to have a contextual understanding of what is being said, and what has been said in the story up to that time frame. No TTS model is capable of that today, and probably not for a long time. > Or maybe a form of extreme compression, voice is converted to text with Whisper, sent over the wire as text, and re-created with the same voice on the receiver. I don't understand the value prop here. The number of cases where you have access to the necessary computational resources, but _not_ adequate bandwidth is so small. The most likely use case is probably scamming. With a small snippet of someone's voice (for example, from answering a robo call) you can now synthesize a completely reasonable sounding phone call for conning people out of their money. By the way, this attack vector was _highly_ effective against the elderly even when the attackers voice sounded quite distinct from the individual that they were posing as. The elderly have no chance against this type of fraud. There is going to be big money in authenticating individuals so that phone calls, etc can happen between trusted parties.

rafaelero 4y ago
> Human voice inflection is hard to mimic because you have to have a contextual understanding of what is being said I think that's correct if we are talking about the author reading his book. But if we are using another person, they have no way to learn the correct vocalization other than using the text. And that's the same input data that the AI is dealing with, so it should be possible for them to be as good as non-authors reading the book.
- monkpit 4y ago
  I disagree. In the case of audiobooks, a language model might be able to store context of the story similar to a reader, but a good reader/voice actor will be able to add emphasis or inflection to enhance the story - and decide to do so based upon the story itself. The AI won’t have understanding of the story itself to know what is appropriate or not. Also, you say only the author could read the story in a certain way. This kind of implies that all audiobook recordings are just 1 long take, with no direction. I am not an expert, but I would assume there’s some creative direction involved.