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Show HN: Banterai – Talk to any AI celebrity, human-like voice conversations
- p0pcult 4y ago[flagged]
- muglug 4y agoGonna go out on a limb and say perhaps the creator of this is a fan.
- justasking7000 4y agoAbsolutely not. Huge hater tbh. Just picked personalities that were of public interest.
- muglug 4y agoI think he's likely more interesting to you than he is to the general public. You might also consider the gender breakdown — you've got 8 men and 4 women (and only two of those women actually exist).
- guiambros 4y agoThe ratio gets even worse when you include the locked ones (under "View all"): 23 men, 8 women, or 3:1 (excluding Anime). +1 to having a more inclusive casting of characters.
- justasking7000 4y agoNoted. Will definitely work on that. Honestly I used ChatGPT to help generate the list of avatars that I thought people would find interesting/controversial.
- p0pcult 4y agoYou can't be a huge hater if you are profiting off of him, or building a business on him.
- xboxnolifes 4y agoThey're just using the available models.
- EGreg 4y agoTrue, Donald Trump was way more chivalrous to women. No one has more respect for women than Donald. No one. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YOvJC-tY2ek https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YOvJC-tY2ek
- p0pcult 4y agoDonald Trump, though I don't like him, gets a pass as he was in fact the president. It would be weird to have Obama there but not Trump.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- KMnO4 4y agoThis is cool and pretty funny. I’m curious what the prompts look like, since everyone I talked was short with me and told me to quit wasting their time (which I guess is pretty in line with their characters).
- justasking7000 4y agoYeah I made it kinda terse on purpose haha. Wanted to give it a bit of a personality.
- upon_drumhead 4y agoDoesn't seem to work at all in Safari. Click the button, hear the phone ring for a second or two and then the page refreshes back to the main page.
- kuczmama 4y agoIt works well on chrome. This is a great implementation. Really feels like I'm looking at the future. One of the coolest demos I've seen in awhile.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zug_zug 4y agoVery fun idea. But it seemed like they "couldn't hear me"
- manca 4y agoGreat job. I must say that the speech synthesis sounds pretty realistic. I talked with Jobs, Musk and Obama and liked how they sounded and more importantly how they handled the questions. Do you mind sharing the entire stack you used to build this? Very well done!
- justasking7000 4y agoThanks much appreciated! It was a mixture of some the latest TTS models. Azure speech to text. Gpt ofc. And some other tools for handling conversational stuff (like interruptions).
- manca 4y agoNicely done. Does Azure Speech to Text also handle speech synthesis and provide out of the box voices for different characters or you had to build your own model to do this? It's impressive if their service can do it all: speech recognition, speech to text and text to speech and in near real-time. I should take a closer look at the Azure ML stack :)
- funwares 4y agoI've been using the Azure Cognitive Services speech recognition and text-to-speech for my own locally run 'speech-to-speech' GPT assistant application. I found the Azure speech recognition to be fantastic, almost never making mistakes. The latency is also at a level that only the big cloud providers can reach. A locally run alternative I use is Vosk [0] but this is nowhere near as polished as Azure speech recognition and limits conversation to simple topics. (Running whisper.cpp locally is not an option for me, too heavy and slow on my machine for a proper conversation) The default Azure models available for text-to-speech are great too. There are around 500 models in a wide variety of languages. Using SSML [1] can also really improve the quality of interactions. A subset of these voices have certain capabilities (like responding with emotions, see 'Speaking styles and roles'). Though in my opinion the default Azure voice models have nothing on what OP is providing. The Scarlett Johansson voice is really really good, especially combined with the personality they have given it. I would love to be able to run this model locally on my machine if OP is willing to share some information about it! Maybe OP could improve the latency of Banterai by dynamically setting the Azure region for speech recognition based on the incoming IP. I see that 'eastus' is used even though I'm in West Europe. But other than that I think this is the best 'speech-to-speech AI' demo I've seen so far. Fantastic job! [0] https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api/ https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api/ [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/speech-service/speech-synthesis-markup https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/s...
- chrisMyzel 4y agoI find the title a bit misleading. Looking at 'Her' I expect agentic behaviour with memory that I'd likely interact with for long periods of time, the proposed applications seems to be not remotely similar to this expectation.
- dang 4y agoOk, we've replaced the title with what the page says. Thanks! (Submitted title was "Show HN: I built a real life version of Her")
- lee101 4y ago[dead]
- nailer 4y agoI cannot get this to work on iOS Safari. Microphone permission is enabled but the voice assistant can’t hear me.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoWow, the “Her” voice is freaky good. And unlike all the other voice assistants, this has a personality.
- Patrick_CTY 4y ago[dead]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stuaxo 4y agoFirst two are Elon and Andrew Tate, no thanks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jeremynevans 4y agoIn particular, Tate is an odd choice for a product with 'banter' in the name, given that he's currently under house arrest while being investigated over human trafficking, not to mention how intensely misogynistic he's consistently been for years.
- justasking7000 4y agoIt's because we thought it would get us more comments like yours which ultimately boosted our hackernews ranking and got us a lot more traffic.