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Does anybody find it funny that sci-fi movies have to heavily distort "robot voices" to make them sound "convincingly robotic"? A robotic, explicitly non-natura
by nine_k 1y ago
Does anybody find it funny that sci-fi movies have to heavily distort "robot voices" to make them sound "convincingly robotic"? A robotic, explicitly non-natural voice would be perfectly acceptable, and even desirable, in many situations. I don't expect a smart toaster to talk like a BBC host; it'd be enough is the speech if easy to recognize.
- roywiggins 1y agoThis one is at least an interesting idea: https://genderlessvoice.com/ https://genderlessvoice.com/
- cosmojg 1y agoThe voice sounds great! I find it quite aesthetically pleasing, but it's far from genderless.
- a96 1y agoSo, what's the gender?
- degamad 1y agoInteresting concept, but why is that site filled with Top X blogspam?
- pbronez 1y agoThe YouTube video [1] was published in 2019. The Blog spam posts range from Nov 2022 to July 2023. Other than the video, the only relevant content is on the about page [2]. It says the voice is a collaboration between 5 different entities, including advocacy groups, marketing firms and a music producer. The video is the only example of the voice in use. There is no API, weights, SDK, etc. I suspect this was a one-off marketing stunt sponsored by Copenhagen pride before the pandemic. The initial reaction was strong enough that a couple years they were still getting a small but steady flow of traffic. One of the involved marketing firms decided to monetize the asset and defaced it with blog spam. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvv6zYOQqm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvv6zYOQqm0 [2] https://genderlessvoice.com/about/ https://genderlessvoice.com/about/
- dang 1y agoMeet Q, a Genderless Voice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19505835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19505835 - March 2019 (235 comments)
- cyberax 1y agoIt doesn't sound genderless.
- pbronez 1y agoHuh. Sounds perfectly intelligible and definitively artificial. Feels weakly feminine to me, but only because I was primed to think about gender from the branding. It’s a good choice for a robot voice. It’s easier to understand than the formant synths or deliberately distorted human voices. The genderless aspect is alien enough to avoid the uncanny valley. You intuitively know you’re dealing with something a little different.
- qmr 1y agoThanks, I hate it.
- userbinator 1y agoA robotic, explicitly non-natural voice would be perfectly acceptable, and even desirable, in many situations[...]it'd be enough is the speech if easy to recognize. We've had formant synths for several decades, and they're perfectly understandable and require a tiny amount of computing power, but people tend not to want to listen to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth https://simulationcorner.net/index.php?page=sam https://simulationcorner.net/index.php?page=sam (try it yourself to hear what it sounds like)
- saretup 1y agoWell, this one is a bit too jarring to the ears.
- rixed 1y agoBut there is no latency, as opposed to KittenTTS, so it certainly has its applications too.
- cess11 1y agoTry this demo, which has more knobs: https://discordier.github.io/sam/ https://discordier.github.io/sam/
- actionfromafar 1y agoI think it's charming
- miki123211 1y agoSAM and the way it works is not what people typically associate with the term "formant synthesizer." DECtalk[1,2] would be a much better example, that's as formant as you get. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk [2] https://webspeak.terminal.ink https://webspeak.terminal.ink
- tapper 1y agoYeah blind people love eloquence
- Twirrim 1y ago> I don't expect a smart toaster to talk like a BBC host; Well sure, the BBC have already established that it's supposed to sound like a brit doing an impersonation of an American: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec
- incone123 1y agoDepends on the movie. Ash and Bishop in the Alien franchise sound human until there's a dramatic reason to sound more 'robotic'. I agree with your wider point. I use Google TTS with Moon+Reader all the time (I tried audio books read by real humans but I prefer the consistency of TTS)
- regularfry 1y agoSlightly different there because it's important in both cases that Ripley (and we) can't tell they're androids until it's explicitly uncovered. The whole point is that they're not presented as artificial. Same in Blade Runner: "more human than human". You don't have a film without the ambiguity there.
- incone123 1y agoYou're right. I should have used Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide as an example instead. There's very light processing on his speech.
- looperhacks 1y agoI remember that the novelization of the fifth element describes that the cops are taught to speak as robotic as possible when using speakers for some reason. Always found the idea weird that someone would _want_ that
- addandsubtract 1y agoIf you're on a Mac, you can type "say [thing to say]" into your terminal.
- msgodel 1y agoI personally prefer the older synthetic voices for TTS when the text is coming from software or a language model.
- mfro 1y agoIn the Culture novels, Iain Banks imagines that we would become uncomfortable with the uncanny realism of transmitted voices / holograms, and intentionally include some level of distortion to indicate you're speaking to an image