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I might be missing something, but what are the non-questionable, or at least non-evil, uses of this technology? Because every single application I can think of

I might be missing something, but what are the non-questionable, or at least non-evil, uses of this technology? Because every single application I can think of is fucked up: porn, identity theft, impersonation, replacing voice actors, stealing the likeness of voice actors, replacing customer support without letting the customers know you're using bots. I guess you could give realistic voices to people that lost their voices by using old recordings, but there's no way that this is a market that justify the investment.

swores 3y ago
What about for remembering lost loved ones? There are dead people I would love to hear talk again, even if I know it's not their personality talking just their voice (and who knows, maybe with LLM training on a single person it could even be roughly their personality, too). I can imagine a fairly big market of both people setting it up before they die, with maybe a whole load of written content and a schedule of when to have it read in future, and people who've just lost someone, and want to recreate their voice to help remember it.
- tonnydourado 3y ago
  > I can imagine a fairly big market (...) I can't, and if I could, I think this would be fairly dystopian. Didn't black mirror have an episode about something similar? I vaguely remember an Asimov/Arthur C. Clark short story about the implications of time travel (ish) tech in a similar context. Sounds like a case of "we've build the torment nexus from classic sci-fi novel 'do not build the torment nexus'"
- dotancohen 3y ago
  Jack Crusher did something similar for Wesley.
- grugagag 3y ago
  We already have ways to preserve the voices of people past their lives. Cloning their voices and writing things in their names is not only wrong but deceptive.
wdb 3y ago
You can use it to easily fix voice overs on you videos without needing to re-record etc.
- tonnydourado 3y ago
  Reasonable, but I'm skeptical of the market
CuriouslyC 3y ago
Text to speech is very close to being able to replace voice actors for a lot of lower budget content. Voice cloning will let directors and creators get just the sound they want for their characters, imagine being able to say "I want something that sounds like Harrison Ford with a French accent." Of course, there are going to be debates about how closely you can clone someone's voice/diction/etc, both extremes are wrong - perfect cloning will hurt artists without bringing extra value to directors/creators, but if we outlaw things that sound similar the technology will be neutered to uselessness.
- tonnydourado 3y ago
  That's basically replacing voice actors and stealing their likeness: both are arguably evil, and mentioned. So, I haven't missed them. P.S.: "but what about small, indie creators" that's not who's gonna embrace this the most, it's big studios, and they will do it to fuck over workers.
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    As someone involved in the AI creator sphere, that's a very cold take. Big studios pay top shelf voice talent to create the best possible experience because they can afford it. Do you think Blizzard is using AI to voice Diablo/Overwatch/Warcraft? Of course not. On the other hand, there are lots of small indie games being made now that utilize TTS, because the alternative is no voice, the voice of a friend or a very low quality voice actor. Do I want to have people making exact clones of voice actors? No. The problem is that if you say "You can't get 90% close to an existing voice actor" then the technology will be able to create almost no human voices, it'll constantly refuse like gemini, even when the request is reasonable. This technology is incredibly powerful and useful, and we shouldn't avoid using it because it'll force a few people to change careers.
    - tonnydourado 3y ago
      Have you seen how big studios treat vfx artists? They absolutely will replace voice actors with AI. Also: > This technology is incredibly powerful and useful At what, exactly? The only "useful" case you presented is "actually, replacing voice actors with AI isn't so bad".
allannienhuis 3y ago
I can think that better quality audio content generated from text would be a killer application. As someone else mentioned, pipe in an epub, output an audiobook or video game content. With additional tooling (likely via ai/llm analysis), this could enable things like dramatic storytelling with specific character voices and dynamics interpreted from the content of the text. I can see it empowering solo creators in similar ways that modern music tools enable solo or small-budget musicians today.
- latexr 3y ago
  > pipe in an epub, output an audiobook or video game content. That falls into “replacing voice actors”, mentioned by the OP.
  - blackqueeriroh 3y ago
    No, it really doesn’t. There are thousands of very smart and talented creators without the budget to hire voice actors. This lets them get a start. AI voices let you lower the barrier to entry, but they won’t replace most voice actors because the higher you go up the stack, the more the demand for real actors will also go up because AI voices aren’t anywhere near being able to replace real voice actors.
    - tonnydourado 3y ago
      As another reply put, I'm very skeptical that the benefits for small content creators will offset the damaged to society as a whole, from increased fraud and harassment.
    - latexr 3y ago
      > AI voices let you lower the barrier to entry, but they won’t replace most voice actors because the higher you go up the stack, the more the demand for real actors will also go up That is as absurd as saying LLMs are increasing the demand for writers. > because AI voices aren’t anywhere near being able to replace real voice actors. Even if that were true—which it is not; the current crop is more than adequate to read long texts—it assumes the technology has reached its limit, which is equally absurd.
mostrepublican 3y ago
I used it to translate a short set of tv shows that were only available in Danish with no subtitles in any other language and made them into English for my personal watching library. The episodes are about 95% just a narrator with some background noises. Elevenlabs did a great job with it and I cranked through the 32 episodes (about 4 mins each) relatively easily. There is a longer series (about 60 hours) only in Japanese that I want to do the same thing for. But don't want to spend Elevenlabs prices to do.
- ukuina 3y ago
  OpenAI TTS is very competitively priced: $15/1M chars.
kajecounterhack 3y ago
I like the idea of cloning my own voice and having it speak in a foreign language
SunlitCat 3y ago
Maybe having better real time conversations in computer games. Like game characters saying your name in voiceovers.
AnonC 3y ago
> what are the non-questionable, or at least non-evil, uses of this technology? iPhone Personal Voice [1] is one. It helps people who are physically losing their voice and the ones around them to still have their voice in a different way. Apple takes long voice samples of various texts for this though. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra9I0HScTDw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra9I0HScTDw
- tonnydourado 3y ago
  That's kinda what I was thinking on the second paragraph. Still, gotta be a small market.
IMTDb 3y ago
Non robotic screen readers for blind people
- tonnydourado 3y ago
  That would be non-evil, sure. But I wonder if blind people even want it? They're already listening to screen readers at insane speeds, up to 6-8x, I think. Do they even care that it doesn't sound "realistic"?
  - blackqueeriroh 3y ago
    Well, I’m sure the blind readers of HN (which I am certain exist) can answer this question, and you, a sighted person, don’t need to even wonder from your position of unknowing.
    - tonnydourado 3y ago
      I mean, I explicitly used "wonder" because I don't wanna assume about blind people's experiences and needs. What else should I have done so you wouldn't come in kicking me in the nuts?
      - SamPatt 3y ago
        In this thread there's a bunch of "non-evil" responses, and your replies are all "I'm skeptical" or just dismissing them outright. It appears from the outside that you've decided this is Officially Bad technology and aren't genuinely seeking evidence otherwise.
        tonnydourado 3y ago
        You're assuming worse of me than I'm assuming of the technology. There's almost no reply here with a use that is a) not somewhat bad and b) has enough of an upside to compensate the downsides. Except maybe this one, but I do know enough about accessibility to know how blind people generally use computers, which is why I asked the question.
Mkengine 3y ago
I don't know how stressful my life will be then, but I thought about reading to my kids later and creating audiobooks with my voice for them, for when I am traveling for work, so they can still listen to me "reading" to them.
bigcoke 3y ago
AI girlfriend... ok I'm done.
- lenerdenator 3y ago
  It's 2024. Are nerds still trying to turn any technology of sufficient ability into Kelly LeBrock?
  - bigcoke 3y ago
    this is going to be a real thing for gen z, but replace kelly with any girl from anime
    - lenerdenator 3y ago
      Jeeze, I can't imagine why women feel so alienated from the tech industry. It's almost as if any time some sort of way to make computers more human-like emerges, the first thing a subset of the men in the space do is think "How can I use this to make a woman who has absolutely no function other than my emotional, practical, and physical gratification?"
      - amenhotep 3y ago
        Humans in desiring deep emotional and sexual connections with people of their desired gender and being driven to weird behaviours when they can't achieve it in the way you personally approve of shock
        lenerdenator 3y ago
        Then work on it. Ask friends for feedback. Go to therapy. Have some damned introspection instead of just reducing 51% of the people on the planet to a bangmaid.
lenerdenator 3y ago
> there's no way that this is a market that justify the investment. It's not just worth justifying investment. You can make just about anything worth the investment as measured by a 90-day window of fiscal reporting. H!tmen were a wildly profitable venture for La Cosa Nostra. It's about not justifying the societal risk.
YoshiRulz 3y ago
It could be used by people who can write English fluently, but are slow at speaking it, as a more personal form of text-to-speech. Personally, I'm eager to have more control over how my voice assistant sounds.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  Similarly, a real-time voice to voice translation system that uses the speakers voice would be really cool.
layer8 3y ago
It enables to use your favorite audiobook reader’s voice for all your TTS needs. E.g. you can have HN comments read to you by Patrick Steward, or by the Honest Trailers voice. Maybe you find that questionable? ;)
- zdragnar 3y ago
  So, replacing voice actors with unpaid clones of their voices, effectively stealing their identity. The range of use goes from totally harmless fun to downright evil.
  - RyanCavanaugh 3y ago
    The existence of Photoshop doesn't mean that you can put Kobe Bryant on a Wheaties box without paying him. There's no reason that a voice talent's voice can't be subject to the same infringement protections as a screen actor's or athlete's likeness.
    - popalchemist 3y ago
      You absolutely can put Kobe on a Wheaties box without problems legally, IF you do not sell it. That's "fair use." It has not been tested in court yet, but precedent seems to suggest that creating voice clones for private use is also fair use, ESPECIALLY if that person is a celebrity, because privacy rights are limited for celebrities.
  - layer8 3y ago
    If I take pictures of someone and hang my home with AI-generated copies of those pictures, I’m not stealing their identity.
- johncalvinyoung 3y ago
  Utterly questionable.
wongarsu 3y ago
Organized crime should be happy to invest in that. Especially the "indian scam callcenter" type of crime.
tompetry 3y ago
I have the same concerns generally. But one non-evil popped into my head... My dad passed away a few months ago. Going through his things, I found all of his old papers and writings; they have great meaning to me. It would be so cool to have them as audio files, my dad as the narrator. And for shits, try it with a British accent. This may not abate the concerns, but I'm sure good things will come too.
- block_dagger 3y ago
  Serious question: is this a healthy way to treat ancestors? In the future will we just keep grandma around as an AI version of her middle aged self when she passes?
  - tompetry 3y ago
    Fair question. People have kept pictures, paintings, art, belongings, etc of their family members for countless generations. AI will surely be used to create new ways to remember loved ones. I think that is a big difference than "keeping around grandma as an AI version of herself", and pretending they are still alive, which I agree feels unhealthy.
    - jaakl 3y ago
      Made me think how different can be generations and what is countless. I can count back 2 and have not even seen anything about my grandfather who was born 101 years before me (1875). At least I have “signature” as XXX in 1860ies on a plan of farmland from his father, when he bought it out from slavery. And that actual farmland. Good luck AIng that heritage.
  - Narishma 3y ago
    There's a Black Mirror episode about something like that, though I don't remember the details.
    - oli-g 3y ago
      Yup, "Be Right Back", S2E1 And possibly another one, but that would be a spoiler
bdcravens 3y ago
The first couple I've come up with are training courses at scale, or converting videos with accents you have a hard time understanding to one you can (no one you'll understand better than yourself)
accrual 3y ago
A long term goal of mine is to have a local LLM trained on my preferences and with a very long memory of past conversations that I could chat with in real time using TTS. It would be amazing to go on a walk with Airpods and chat with it, ask questions, learn about topics, etc.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  I do that already with the chatgpt mobile app, but not with my own voice. I'd like it if there were more (and non-american) voice options, but I don't think I'd ever want it to be my voice I'm hearing back.
  - accrual 3y ago
    Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily want it to be my own voice either, but it would be very cool to make it be the voice of someone I enjoy listening to. :)
victorbjorklund 3y ago
Why is replacing voice actors evil? How is it worse than replacing any other job using a machine/software?
- buu700 3y ago
  Agreed. I think the framing of "stealing" is a needlessly pessimistic prediction of how it might be used. If a person owns their own likeness, it would be logical to implement legal protections for AI impersonations of one's voice. I could imagine a popular voice actor scaling up their career by using AI for a first draft rendering of their part of a script and then selectively refining particular lines with more detailed prompts and/or recording them manually. This raises a lot of complicated issues and questions, but the use case isn't inherently bad.
- machomaster 3y ago
  The problem is not about replacing actors with technology. It is about replacing the particular actors with their computer-generated voice. It's about likeness-theft.
spyder 3y ago
Huh? Replacing human labor with machine is evil? You wouldn't even able to post this comment without that happening, because computers wouldn't exists or we wouldn't have time for that because many of us would work on farms to produce enough food without the use of human-replacing technologies. In a similar way as machines allowed to produce abundance of food with less labor, the voice AI combined with AI translation can make information more accesible for the world. Voice actors wouldn't be able to voice act all the useful information in the world, (especially for the more niche topics and for the smaller languages) because it wouldn't worth to pay them and humans are also slower to than machines. We are not far from almost realtime voice translation from any language to any other one. Sure, we can do it with text-only translation, but voice makes it more accessible for lot of people. ( For example between 5–10% of the world has dislexya. )
albert_e 3y ago
If I am learning new content I can make my own notes and convert them into an audiobook for my morning jog or office commute using my own voice. If I am a content creator I can generate content more easily by letting my AI voice narrate my slides say. Yes that is cheap and lower quality than a real narrator who can deliver more effective real talks ...but there is a long tail of mediocre content on every topic. Who cares as long as I am having fun, sharing stuff, and not doing anything illegal or wrong.
pksebben 3y ago
There's a huge gap in uses where listenable, realistic voice is required, but the text to be spoken is not predetermined. Think AI agents, NPCs in dynamically generated games, etc. These things are currently not really doable with the current crop of TTS because either they take too long to run or they sound awful. I think the bulk of where this stuff will be useful isn't really visible yet b/c we haven't had the tech to play around with enough. There is also certainly a huge swath of bad-actor stuff that this is good for. I feel like a lot of the problems with modern tech falls under the umbrella of "We're not collectively mature enough to handle this much power" and I wish there were a better solution for all of that.
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  eh, you mean the solution isn't, so here's even more power... see you next week!
  - pksebben 3y ago
    If I'm getting your meaning, that is - we don't have a fix for "we can but we ought not to", then yeah I see what you mean. Even that is not straightforward, unfortunately. There's this thing where the tech is going to be here, one way or the other. What we may have some influence on isn't whether it shows up, but who has it. ...which brings me to what I see as the core of contention between anyone conversing in this space. Who do you think is a bigger threat? Large multinational globocorps or individual fanatics, or someone else that might get their hands on this stuff? From my perspective, we've gone a long time handing over control of "things"; society, tax dollars, armaments, law - to the larger centralized entities (globocorps and political parties and wall street and so on and so on). Things throughout this period have become incrementally worser and worser, and occasionally (here's looking at you, september '08) rapidly worser. Put in short, huge centralized single-points-of-failure are the greater evil. "Terrorists", "Commies", "Malcontents" (whatever you wanna call folks with an axe to grind) make up a much lesser (but still present!) danger. So that leaves us in a really awkward position, right? We have these things that (could) amount to digital nukes (or anything on a spectra towards such) and we're having this conversation about whether to keep going on them while everyone knows full well that on some level, we can't be trusted. It's not great and I'll be the first to admit that. But, I'm much more concerned about the people with strike drones and billions of dollars of warchest having exclusive access to this stuff than I am about joey-mad-about-baloney having them. Joey could do one-time damage to some system, or maybe fleece your grandma for her life savings (which is bad, and I'm not trying to minimize it). Globocorp (which in this scenario could actually be a single incredibly rich dude with a swarm of AI to carry out his will) could institute a year-round propaganda machine that suppresses dissent while algorithmically targeting whoever it deems "dangerous" with strike drones and automated turrets. And we'd never hear about it. The 'media AI' could just decide not to tell us. So yeah, I'm kinda on the side of "do it all, but do it in the open so's we can see it". Not ideal, but better than the alternatives AFAICT.
paczki 3y ago
The ability to use my own voice in other languages so I can do localization on my own youtube videos would be huge. With game development as well, being able to be my own voice actor would save me an immense amount of money that I do not have and give me even more creative freedom and direction of exactly what I want. It's not ready yet, but I do believe that it will come.
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  People are already doing this and it was hugely controversial in The Finals
  - rbits 3y ago
    I feel like the main reason, though, was that they could easily afford real voice actors.
    - itsTyrion 3y ago
      that's... exactly what they did. They hired real VAs that recorded some lines that are used as-is in the game, and stuff for training, which is to make more dynamic commentary about the match. It was a controversy because people saw "AI" and lost their marbles. Nothing wrong if it's contracted/licensed training data.
      - mewpmewp2 3y ago
        Ability to do it realtime in video games in general seems huge.
  - fennecfoxy 3y ago
    There's a bit thing atm around human creative work being replaced by AI; even if a voice isn't cloned but just generated by AI it gets people frothing as if human hands in factories haven't been replaced by robots, or a human rider on horseback wasn't replaced by an engine.
dougmwne 3y ago
It seems like it would be great for any kind of voiceover work or any recorded training or presentation. If you want to correct a mis-speak or add some information, instead of re-recording the entire segment, you could seamlessly update a few words or sentences.
thatguysaguy 3y ago
I'm 100% going to clone my voice and use it on my discord bot.
andrewmcwatters 3y ago
I want to preserve samples of my voice as I age so that when voice replication technology improves in the future, I can hear myself from a different time of my life in ways that are not prerecorded. I would also like to give my children this as a novelty of preserved family history so if I so desire, I can have fun with them by letting them hear me from different ages.
thatguysaguy 3y ago
To think of non-evil versions just consider cases where right now there's no voice actor to replace, but you could add a voice. E.g. indie games.
drusepth 3y ago
Super-niche use-case: our game studio prototyped a multiplayer horror game where we played with cloning player voices to be able to secretly relay messages to certain players as if it came from one of their team-mates (e.g. "go check out below deck" to split a pair of players up, or "I think Bob is trying to sabotage us" to sew inter-player distrust, etc). Less-niche use-case: if you use TTS for voice-overs and/or NPC dialogue, there can still be a lot of variance in speech patterns / tone / inflections / etc when using a model where you've just customized parameters for each NPC -- using a voice-clone approach, upon first tests, seems like it might provide more long-term consistency. Bonus: in a lot of voiced-over (non-J)RPGs, the main character is text-only (intentionally not voiced) because they're often intended to be a self-insert of the player (compared to JRPGs which typically have the player "embody" a more fleshed-out player with their own voice). If you really want to lean into self-insert patterns, you could have a player provide a short sample of their voice at the beginning of the game and use that for generating voice-overs for their player character's dialogue throughout the game.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  The idea of a personalized protagonist voice is interesting, but I'd worry about some kind of uncanny valley where it sounds like myself but is using the wrong word-choices or inflections. Actually, getting it to sound "like myself" in the first place is an extra challenge! For many people even actual recordings sound "wrong", probably because your self-perception involves spoken sound being transmitted through your neck and head, with a different blend of frequencies. After that is solved, there's still the problem of bystanders remarking: "Is that supposed to sound like you? It doesn't sound like you."
  - Kinrany 3y ago
    Being able to show friends your internal voice would be cool.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Jordrok 3y ago
sunshine_reggae 3y ago
You forgot plausible deniability, AKA "I never said that".
onel 3y ago
Podcast ads I used to work in the space and host read ads are the best performers compared to other types of audio ads. Imagine you can automate that ad creation as a podcaster/platform. You just give it the script and it creates a new ad in that voice. Now, is this wrong? I think this is a separate discussion
unraveller 3y ago
New uses will be fashioned. Imagine altering the output accent of your assistant on the fly to signify more information like sarcasm, posh accent for assuredness etc no one else listening over the shoulder can detect the true private meaning without your permission. We needn't be stuck in confines of the public dialogue communication world.

swores 3y ago

What about for remembering lost loved ones? There are dead people I would love to hear talk again, even if I know it's not their personality talking just their voice (and who knows, maybe with LLM training on a single person it could even be roughly their personality, too). I can imagine a fairly big market of both people setting it up before they die, with maybe a whole load of written content and a schedule of when to have it read in future, and people who've just lost someone, and want to recreate their voice to help remember it.

tonnydourado 3y ago
> I can imagine a fairly big market (...) I can't, and if I could, I think this would be fairly dystopian. Didn't black mirror have an episode about something similar? I vaguely remember an Asimov/Arthur C. Clark short story about the implications of time travel (ish) tech in a similar context. Sounds like a case of "we've build the torment nexus from classic sci-fi novel 'do not build the torment nexus'"
dotancohen 3y ago
Jack Crusher did something similar for Wesley.
grugagag 3y ago
We already have ways to preserve the voices of people past their lives. Cloning their voices and writing things in their names is not only wrong but deceptive.

wdb 3y ago

You can use it to easily fix voice overs on you videos without needing to re-record etc.

tonnydourado 3y ago
Reasonable, but I'm skeptical of the market

CuriouslyC 3y ago

Text to speech is very close to being able to replace voice actors for a lot of lower budget content. Voice cloning will let directors and creators get just the sound they want for their characters, imagine being able to say "I want something that sounds like Harrison Ford with a French accent." Of course, there are going to be debates about how closely you can clone someone's voice/diction/etc, both extremes are wrong - perfect cloning will hurt artists without bringing extra value to directors/creators, but if we outlaw things that sound similar the technology will be neutered to uselessness.

tonnydourado 3y ago
That's basically replacing voice actors and stealing their likeness: both are arguably evil, and mentioned. So, I haven't missed them. P.S.: "but what about small, indie creators" that's not who's gonna embrace this the most, it's big studios, and they will do it to fuck over workers.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  As someone involved in the AI creator sphere, that's a very cold take. Big studios pay top shelf voice talent to create the best possible experience because they can afford it. Do you think Blizzard is using AI to voice Diablo/Overwatch/Warcraft? Of course not. On the other hand, there are lots of small indie games being made now that utilize TTS, because the alternative is no voice, the voice of a friend or a very low quality voice actor. Do I want to have people making exact clones of voice actors? No. The problem is that if you say "You can't get 90% close to an existing voice actor" then the technology will be able to create almost no human voices, it'll constantly refuse like gemini, even when the request is reasonable. This technology is incredibly powerful and useful, and we shouldn't avoid using it because it'll force a few people to change careers.
  - tonnydourado 3y ago
    Have you seen how big studios treat vfx artists? They absolutely will replace voice actors with AI. Also: > This technology is incredibly powerful and useful At what, exactly? The only "useful" case you presented is "actually, replacing voice actors with AI isn't so bad".

allannienhuis 3y ago

I can think that better quality audio content generated from text would be a killer application. As someone else mentioned, pipe in an epub, output an audiobook or video game content. With additional tooling (likely via ai/llm analysis), this could enable things like dramatic storytelling with specific character voices and dynamics interpreted from the content of the text. I can see it empowering solo creators in similar ways that modern music tools enable solo or small-budget musicians today.

latexr 3y ago
> pipe in an epub, output an audiobook or video game content. That falls into “replacing voice actors”, mentioned by the OP.
- blackqueeriroh 3y ago
  No, it really doesn’t. There are thousands of very smart and talented creators without the budget to hire voice actors. This lets them get a start. AI voices let you lower the barrier to entry, but they won’t replace most voice actors because the higher you go up the stack, the more the demand for real actors will also go up because AI voices aren’t anywhere near being able to replace real voice actors.
  - tonnydourado 3y ago
    As another reply put, I'm very skeptical that the benefits for small content creators will offset the damaged to society as a whole, from increased fraud and harassment.
  - latexr 3y ago
    > AI voices let you lower the barrier to entry, but they won’t replace most voice actors because the higher you go up the stack, the more the demand for real actors will also go up That is as absurd as saying LLMs are increasing the demand for writers. > because AI voices aren’t anywhere near being able to replace real voice actors. Even if that were true—which it is not; the current crop is more than adequate to read long texts—it assumes the technology has reached its limit, which is equally absurd.

mostrepublican 3y ago

I used it to translate a short set of tv shows that were only available in Danish with no subtitles in any other language and made them into English for my personal watching library. The episodes are about 95% just a narrator with some background noises. Elevenlabs did a great job with it and I cranked through the 32 episodes (about 4 mins each) relatively easily. There is a longer series (about 60 hours) only in Japanese that I want to do the same thing for. But don't want to spend Elevenlabs prices to do.

ukuina 3y ago
OpenAI TTS is very competitively priced: $15/1M chars.

kajecounterhack 3y ago

I like the idea of cloning my own voice and having it speak in a foreign language

SunlitCat 3y ago

Maybe having better real time conversations in computer games. Like game characters saying your name in voiceovers.

AnonC 3y ago

> what are the non-questionable, or at least non-evil, uses of this technology? iPhone Personal Voice [1] is one. It helps people who are physically losing their voice and the ones around them to still have their voice in a different way. Apple takes long voice samples of various texts for this though. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra9I0HScTDw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra9I0HScTDw

tonnydourado 3y ago
That's kinda what I was thinking on the second paragraph. Still, gotta be a small market.

IMTDb 3y ago

Non robotic screen readers for blind people

tonnydourado 3y ago
That would be non-evil, sure. But I wonder if blind people even want it? They're already listening to screen readers at insane speeds, up to 6-8x, I think. Do they even care that it doesn't sound "realistic"?
- blackqueeriroh 3y ago
  Well, I’m sure the blind readers of HN (which I am certain exist) can answer this question, and you, a sighted person, don’t need to even wonder from your position of unknowing.
  - tonnydourado 3y ago
    I mean, I explicitly used "wonder" because I don't wanna assume about blind people's experiences and needs. What else should I have done so you wouldn't come in kicking me in the nuts?
    - SamPatt 3y ago
      In this thread there's a bunch of "non-evil" responses, and your replies are all "I'm skeptical" or just dismissing them outright. It appears from the outside that you've decided this is Officially Bad technology and aren't genuinely seeking evidence otherwise.
      - tonnydourado 3y ago
        You're assuming worse of me than I'm assuming of the technology. There's almost no reply here with a use that is a) not somewhat bad and b) has enough of an upside to compensate the downsides. Except maybe this one, but I do know enough about accessibility to know how blind people generally use computers, which is why I asked the question.

Mkengine 3y ago

I don't know how stressful my life will be then, but I thought about reading to my kids later and creating audiobooks with my voice for them, for when I am traveling for work, so they can still listen to me "reading" to them.

bigcoke 3y ago

AI girlfriend... ok I'm done.

lenerdenator 3y ago
It's 2024. Are nerds still trying to turn any technology of sufficient ability into Kelly LeBrock?
- bigcoke 3y ago
  this is going to be a real thing for gen z, but replace kelly with any girl from anime
  - lenerdenator 3y ago
    Jeeze, I can't imagine why women feel so alienated from the tech industry. It's almost as if any time some sort of way to make computers more human-like emerges, the first thing a subset of the men in the space do is think "How can I use this to make a woman who has absolutely no function other than my emotional, practical, and physical gratification?"
    - amenhotep 3y ago
      Humans in desiring deep emotional and sexual connections with people of their desired gender and being driven to weird behaviours when they can't achieve it in the way you personally approve of shock
      - lenerdenator 3y ago
        Then work on it. Ask friends for feedback. Go to therapy. Have some damned introspection instead of just reducing 51% of the people on the planet to a bangmaid.

lenerdenator 3y ago

> there's no way that this is a market that justify the investment. It's not just worth justifying investment. You can make just about anything worth the investment as measured by a 90-day window of fiscal reporting. H!tmen were a wildly profitable venture for La Cosa Nostra. It's about not justifying the societal risk.

YoshiRulz 3y ago

It could be used by people who can write English fluently, but are slow at speaking it, as a more personal form of text-to-speech. Personally, I'm eager to have more control over how my voice assistant sounds.

Zambyte 3y ago
Similarly, a real-time voice to voice translation system that uses the speakers voice would be really cool.

layer8 3y ago

It enables to use your favorite audiobook reader’s voice for all your TTS needs. E.g. you can have HN comments read to you by Patrick Steward, or by the Honest Trailers voice. Maybe you find that questionable? ;)

zdragnar 3y ago
So, replacing voice actors with unpaid clones of their voices, effectively stealing their identity. The range of use goes from totally harmless fun to downright evil.
- RyanCavanaugh 3y ago
  The existence of Photoshop doesn't mean that you can put Kobe Bryant on a Wheaties box without paying him. There's no reason that a voice talent's voice can't be subject to the same infringement protections as a screen actor's or athlete's likeness.
  - popalchemist 3y ago
    You absolutely can put Kobe on a Wheaties box without problems legally, IF you do not sell it. That's "fair use." It has not been tested in court yet, but precedent seems to suggest that creating voice clones for private use is also fair use, ESPECIALLY if that person is a celebrity, because privacy rights are limited for celebrities.
- layer8 3y ago
  If I take pictures of someone and hang my home with AI-generated copies of those pictures, I’m not stealing their identity.
johncalvinyoung 3y ago
Utterly questionable.

wongarsu 3y ago

Organized crime should be happy to invest in that. Especially the "indian scam callcenter" type of crime.

tompetry 3y ago

I have the same concerns generally. But one non-evil popped into my head... My dad passed away a few months ago. Going through his things, I found all of his old papers and writings; they have great meaning to me. It would be so cool to have them as audio files, my dad as the narrator. And for shits, try it with a British accent. This may not abate the concerns, but I'm sure good things will come too.

block_dagger 3y ago
Serious question: is this a healthy way to treat ancestors? In the future will we just keep grandma around as an AI version of her middle aged self when she passes?
- tompetry 3y ago
  Fair question. People have kept pictures, paintings, art, belongings, etc of their family members for countless generations. AI will surely be used to create new ways to remember loved ones. I think that is a big difference than "keeping around grandma as an AI version of herself", and pretending they are still alive, which I agree feels unhealthy.
  - jaakl 3y ago
    Made me think how different can be generations and what is countless. I can count back 2 and have not even seen anything about my grandfather who was born 101 years before me (1875). At least I have “signature” as XXX in 1860ies on a plan of farmland from his father, when he bought it out from slavery. And that actual farmland. Good luck AIng that heritage.
- Narishma 3y ago
  There's a Black Mirror episode about something like that, though I don't remember the details.
  - oli-g 3y ago
    Yup, "Be Right Back", S2E1 And possibly another one, but that would be a spoiler

bdcravens 3y ago

The first couple I've come up with are training courses at scale, or converting videos with accents you have a hard time understanding to one you can (no one you'll understand better than yourself)

accrual 3y ago

A long term goal of mine is to have a local LLM trained on my preferences and with a very long memory of past conversations that I could chat with in real time using TTS. It would be amazing to go on a walk with Airpods and chat with it, ask questions, learn about topics, etc.

willsmith72 3y ago
I do that already with the chatgpt mobile app, but not with my own voice. I'd like it if there were more (and non-american) voice options, but I don't think I'd ever want it to be my voice I'm hearing back.
- accrual 3y ago
  Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily want it to be my own voice either, but it would be very cool to make it be the voice of someone I enjoy listening to. :)

victorbjorklund 3y ago

Why is replacing voice actors evil? How is it worse than replacing any other job using a machine/software?

buu700 3y ago
Agreed. I think the framing of "stealing" is a needlessly pessimistic prediction of how it might be used. If a person owns their own likeness, it would be logical to implement legal protections for AI impersonations of one's voice. I could imagine a popular voice actor scaling up their career by using AI for a first draft rendering of their part of a script and then selectively refining particular lines with more detailed prompts and/or recording them manually. This raises a lot of complicated issues and questions, but the use case isn't inherently bad.
machomaster 3y ago
The problem is not about replacing actors with technology. It is about replacing the particular actors with their computer-generated voice. It's about likeness-theft.

spyder 3y ago

Huh? Replacing human labor with machine is evil? You wouldn't even able to post this comment without that happening, because computers wouldn't exists or we wouldn't have time for that because many of us would work on farms to produce enough food without the use of human-replacing technologies. In a similar way as machines allowed to produce abundance of food with less labor, the voice AI combined with AI translation can make information more accesible for the world. Voice actors wouldn't be able to voice act all the useful information in the world, (especially for the more niche topics and for the smaller languages) because it wouldn't worth to pay them and humans are also slower to than machines. We are not far from almost realtime voice translation from any language to any other one. Sure, we can do it with text-only translation, but voice makes it more accessible for lot of people. ( For example between 5–10% of the world has dislexya. )

albert_e 3y ago

If I am learning new content I can make my own notes and convert them into an audiobook for my morning jog or office commute using my own voice. If I am a content creator I can generate content more easily by letting my AI voice narrate my slides say. Yes that is cheap and lower quality than a real narrator who can deliver more effective real talks ...but there is a long tail of mediocre content on every topic. Who cares as long as I am having fun, sharing stuff, and not doing anything illegal or wrong.

pksebben 3y ago

There's a huge gap in uses where listenable, realistic voice is required, but the text to be spoken is not predetermined. Think AI agents, NPCs in dynamically generated games, etc. These things are currently not really doable with the current crop of TTS because either they take too long to run or they sound awful. I think the bulk of where this stuff will be useful isn't really visible yet b/c we haven't had the tech to play around with enough. There is also certainly a huge swath of bad-actor stuff that this is good for. I feel like a lot of the problems with modern tech falls under the umbrella of "We're not collectively mature enough to handle this much power" and I wish there were a better solution for all of that.

gremlinsinc 3y ago
eh, you mean the solution isn't, so here's even more power... see you next week!
- pksebben 3y ago
  If I'm getting your meaning, that is - we don't have a fix for "we can but we ought not to", then yeah I see what you mean. Even that is not straightforward, unfortunately. There's this thing where the tech is going to be here, one way or the other. What we may have some influence on isn't whether it shows up, but who has it. ...which brings me to what I see as the core of contention between anyone conversing in this space. Who do you think is a bigger threat? Large multinational globocorps or individual fanatics, or someone else that might get their hands on this stuff? From my perspective, we've gone a long time handing over control of "things"; society, tax dollars, armaments, law - to the larger centralized entities (globocorps and political parties and wall street and so on and so on). Things throughout this period have become incrementally worser and worser, and occasionally (here's looking at you, september '08) rapidly worser. Put in short, huge centralized single-points-of-failure are the greater evil. "Terrorists", "Commies", "Malcontents" (whatever you wanna call folks with an axe to grind) make up a much lesser (but still present!) danger. So that leaves us in a really awkward position, right? We have these things that (could) amount to digital nukes (or anything on a spectra towards such) and we're having this conversation about whether to keep going on them while everyone knows full well that on some level, we can't be trusted. It's not great and I'll be the first to admit that. But, I'm much more concerned about the people with strike drones and billions of dollars of warchest having exclusive access to this stuff than I am about joey-mad-about-baloney having them. Joey could do one-time damage to some system, or maybe fleece your grandma for her life savings (which is bad, and I'm not trying to minimize it). Globocorp (which in this scenario could actually be a single incredibly rich dude with a swarm of AI to carry out his will) could institute a year-round propaganda machine that suppresses dissent while algorithmically targeting whoever it deems "dangerous" with strike drones and automated turrets. And we'd never hear about it. The 'media AI' could just decide not to tell us. So yeah, I'm kinda on the side of "do it all, but do it in the open so's we can see it". Not ideal, but better than the alternatives AFAICT.

paczki 3y ago

The ability to use my own voice in other languages so I can do localization on my own youtube videos would be huge. With game development as well, being able to be my own voice actor would save me an immense amount of money that I do not have and give me even more creative freedom and direction of exactly what I want. It's not ready yet, but I do believe that it will come.

Capricorn2481 3y ago
People are already doing this and it was hugely controversial in The Finals
- rbits 3y ago
  I feel like the main reason, though, was that they could easily afford real voice actors.
  - itsTyrion 3y ago
    that's... exactly what they did. They hired real VAs that recorded some lines that are used as-is in the game, and stuff for training, which is to make more dynamic commentary about the match. It was a controversy because people saw "AI" and lost their marbles. Nothing wrong if it's contracted/licensed training data.
    - mewpmewp2 3y ago
      Ability to do it realtime in video games in general seems huge.
- fennecfoxy 3y ago
  There's a bit thing atm around human creative work being replaced by AI; even if a voice isn't cloned but just generated by AI it gets people frothing as if human hands in factories haven't been replaced by robots, or a human rider on horseback wasn't replaced by an engine.

dougmwne 3y ago

It seems like it would be great for any kind of voiceover work or any recorded training or presentation. If you want to correct a mis-speak or add some information, instead of re-recording the entire segment, you could seamlessly update a few words or sentences.

thatguysaguy 3y ago

I'm 100% going to clone my voice and use it on my discord bot.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago

I want to preserve samples of my voice as I age so that when voice replication technology improves in the future, I can hear myself from a different time of my life in ways that are not prerecorded. I would also like to give my children this as a novelty of preserved family history so if I so desire, I can have fun with them by letting them hear me from different ages.

thatguysaguy 3y ago

To think of non-evil versions just consider cases where right now there's no voice actor to replace, but you could add a voice. E.g. indie games.

drusepth 3y ago

Super-niche use-case: our game studio prototyped a multiplayer horror game where we played with cloning player voices to be able to secretly relay messages to certain players as if it came from one of their team-mates (e.g. "go check out below deck" to split a pair of players up, or "I think Bob is trying to sabotage us" to sew inter-player distrust, etc). Less-niche use-case: if you use TTS for voice-overs and/or NPC dialogue, there can still be a lot of variance in speech patterns / tone / inflections / etc when using a model where you've just customized parameters for each NPC -- using a voice-clone approach, upon first tests, seems like it might provide more long-term consistency. Bonus: in a lot of voiced-over (non-J)RPGs, the main character is text-only (intentionally not voiced) because they're often intended to be a self-insert of the player (compared to JRPGs which typically have the player "embody" a more fleshed-out player with their own voice). If you really want to lean into self-insert patterns, you could have a player provide a short sample of their voice at the beginning of the game and use that for generating voice-overs for their player character's dialogue throughout the game.

Terr_ 3y ago
The idea of a personalized protagonist voice is interesting, but I'd worry about some kind of uncanny valley where it sounds like myself but is using the wrong word-choices or inflections. Actually, getting it to sound "like myself" in the first place is an extra challenge! For many people even actual recordings sound "wrong", probably because your self-perception involves spoken sound being transmitted through your neck and head, with a different blend of frequencies. After that is solved, there's still the problem of bystanders remarking: "Is that supposed to sound like you? It doesn't sound like you."
- Kinrany 3y ago
  Being able to show friends your internal voice would be cool.
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Jordrok 3y ago

sunshine_reggae 3y ago

You forgot plausible deniability, AKA "I never said that".

onel 3y ago

Podcast ads I used to work in the space and host read ads are the best performers compared to other types of audio ads. Imagine you can automate that ad creation as a podcaster/platform. You just give it the script and it creates a new ad in that voice. Now, is this wrong? I think this is a separate discussion

unraveller 3y ago

New uses will be fashioned. Imagine altering the output accent of your assistant on the fly to signify more information like sarcasm, posh accent for assuredness etc no one else listening over the shoulder can detect the true private meaning without your permission. We needn't be stuck in confines of the public dialogue communication world.