6 ms·

Can someone give me a practical use case where this adds a net benefit to society?

shinycode 3y ago
Aside from the fact that is will be easier to scam people, I fail to see benefits. We can already translate everything with the same synthetic voice
Lerc 3y ago
Unifying a voice in tutorial videos so that the difference in voice does not distract the learner. Auto non-toxic rephrasing of online chat in video games, let people hear their voice but paraphrase what they said in a manner that doesn't turn the platform into a cesspit. Cloning your own voice so that you can turn a script into audio without 50 takes and then having to remove a million Ums and errs.
- grayhatter 3y ago
  > Auto non-toxic rephrasing of online chat in video games, let people hear their voice but paraphrase what they said in a manner that doesn't turn the platform into a cesspit. that feels very orwellian
  - ben_w 3y ago
    George Orwell — 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.' I think this is closer to the direction of Huxley in Brave New World, where a deeper understanding of how to manipulate without brute force creates a very different dystopian society than 1984.
    - haroldp 3y ago
      "Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Censorship by itself doesn't stop people thinking (or even expressing) forbidden thoughts, it stops a person's words reaching other people. BNW had a similar effect by conditioning, rather than by applying the strong form of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
        haroldp 3y ago
        It's not perfectly isometric, but neither is it a stretch to call it orwellian.
- paradox460 3y ago
  Real time translation in the speakers own voice.
  - treetalker 3y ago
    While listening to the examples given, I noted the cross-language ones. I’m eager to improve my accents in my nonnative languages by cloning my voice and comparing recordings of how I do sound with how I would sound as a native speaker!
  - abetusk 3y ago
    This is an exceptional use case! Mr Beast talked about translating his videos to other languages to get more reach. This can be done for people with limited budget or just in general so people can watch videos without needing subtitles. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw this incorporated into YT in the near future.
    - paradox460 3y ago
      Another really good one would be for RPGs. Instead of clumsy approaches like "Hey Dragonborn" and whatnot, they could actually say your character's name out loud.
      - abetusk 3y ago
        Right, and taking it one step further, LLMs in games with voice actors providing the basis for dynamic dialogue that sounds like it's coming from a person.
diggan 3y ago
Person A used to be able to speak, but lost their voice in a accident/because of reason Y. Luckily, there is surviving audio/video with their voice on it, so a text-to-voice with their own voice could be created for them to use.
goodluckchuck 3y ago
Possibly speech therapy. Certainly entertainment. Movies / TV. It opens a new opportunity for videogames with generative characters.
kushie 3y ago
apple has Personal Voice for accessibility
ldoughty 3y ago
From an indie game dev standpoint, I can probably say a sentence or two in a given way using my standard headset microphone.. and something like this would allow for clean voice lines fairly easily, as long as they don't need to stress too much emotion... But for a $0 game, that would still be beneficial. Imagine all the 2D Zelda/FF like games that don't get played today because people would rather listen to dialogue than read. Of course, there's also the preservation of the voice of a loved one. I would probably pay to hear my father's voice again but there"s probably only one or two VHS tapes with his voice on it.
nickpsecurity 3y ago
My pastor has an injured, vocal cord that makes him sound gritty at times. A technology like this applied to old copies of his speaking might make him sound like he used to. I don’t know if he’d use something like that since we mostly rely on the Spirit of Christ to open hearts to the truth. Outside public speakers, there’s probably other people whose lost their voice or have trouble vocalizing who might want to sound like their old selves. This could help them. Disclaimer: I think these techs will more often do damage than good. I’m just brainstorming an answer to your question.
grayhatter 3y ago
No. The real answer is yes, I could probably come up with some contrived examples, like I lost my voice in a freak LLM accident and now want to clone my old voice. But this doesn't (you don't?) really need a net benefit reason to figure it out and publish it. Because why? I assume, because "this shouldn't exist!" which is just a more palatable wa to phrase "won't someone think of the children". Society doesn't benefit from ignorance, so given it can exist, what's the problem with it existing? Why does it need a practical reason? Because people will do bad things with it? Duh, but I'd rather everyone know then just the bad guys
- johnnyworker 3y ago
  > Why does it need a practical reason? To at least give us something as a consolation for all the havoc all sorts of deep fakes will wreak on societies. It's like asking what a knife can be used for other than murder. It's a valid question.
  - grayhatter 3y ago
    It's a valid question, but not a good one. The implication is something needs a reason to exist. This is a new technology, and just like all new technologies, the fear of it is spreading faster than the understanding. Scams aren't going away. Will this make it easier to scam some people? Absolutely, so did the internet. I'm not claiming this is anything like the internet. My argument closer to, the reason people get scammed isn't because [thing exists] it's because bad people lie, and kind people trust them. We can all wring our hands in fear over what the new technology might do, or we can solve the problems we care about. Authenticity was hard before this, and it'll be hard after.
    - johnnyworker 3y ago
      > But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live. > If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used. -- Joseph Weizenbaum That is not fear. That is being serious and unflinching, if anything. > We can all wring our hands in fear over what the new technology might do, or we can solve the problems we care about. I'm doing neither. I said it's a valid question, with which you agree. The rest is a straw man apropos nothing anyone actually said, here, and wringing your hands about it. It's a way bigger waste of time than asking a simple question and let those who want to answer that, and let those who don't want answer it simply don't answer it, instead of making up this "issue" with the question itself. > Authenticity was hard before this, and it'll be hard after. So "nothing changes", but technology is super important? You could say the same about, say, curing cancer. People will live for a while and then die, with or without it. Why since it makes no difference, what'd be the problem with "fearing" it?
abetusk 3y ago
James Earl Jones, presumably hedging against his eventual demise, has allowed his voice to be used for things like the Star Wars franchise [0]. Small, independent film makers can now use a skeleton crew to voice parts. I can't imagine it would be anything other than a niche service, but hearing the voice and, potentially, interacting with a chatbot/LLM with the voice of a passed love one. This is off the top of my head. I would also guess that this technology is a stepping stone for other weird, interesting and profoundly helpful uses. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/24/23370097/darth-vader-james-earl-jones-obi-wan-kenobi-star-wars-ai-disney-lucasfilm https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/24/23370097/darth-vader-jame...
stale2002 3y ago
Well we could just look at the obvious and existing use cases for text to speech stuff. Alexa, siri, and similar, are all common place. Another huge usecase would be anything to do with voice acting. Either in video games, cartoons, or the like. This would completely democratize voice acting material, and would empower anyone to be able to do this for cheap.
- mattlondon 3y ago
  ... and put 99% of voice actors out of business. We'll eventually end up with every TV show, movie, and, video game being voiced by Ryan Gosling and Beyonce because market research.
  - stale2002 3y ago
    Technology that makes things better, faster, and more democratized does tend to harm those who profit off of things being expensive and gatekept, yes. Democratization will always be the enemy of those who profit from preventing others from being empowered.
dqv 3y ago
If you've ever done voice prompt recordings for a phone system, voice cloning would be super helpful for doing one off tweaks, especially if you have to record a bunch. Instead of rerecording 20 messages, which can sometimes take hours, you can use a clone of your own voice to make the necessary modifications. My friend does a lot of recordings as part of his job and when I showed him the Adobe voice editing preview he got really excited. It has the potential to make tweaks a lot easier, less time consuming, and reduce voice strain.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
userbinator 3y ago
You would be able to translate media into the language of your choice, but also retaining the original voices.
cchance 3y ago
Imagine being able to handle translations live and hearing the persons voice translated as if they were speaking to you in your native language with their own voice is a big one

Aside from the fact that is will be easier to scam people, I fail to see benefits. We can already translate everything with the same synthetic voice

Lerc 3y ago

Unifying a voice in tutorial videos so that the difference in voice does not distract the learner. Auto non-toxic rephrasing of online chat in video games, let people hear their voice but paraphrase what they said in a manner that doesn't turn the platform into a cesspit. Cloning your own voice so that you can turn a script into audio without 50 takes and then having to remove a million Ums and errs.

grayhatter 3y ago
> Auto non-toxic rephrasing of online chat in video games, let people hear their voice but paraphrase what they said in a manner that doesn't turn the platform into a cesspit. that feels very orwellian
- ben_w 3y ago
  George Orwell — 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.' I think this is closer to the direction of Huxley in Brave New World, where a deeper understanding of how to manipulate without brute force creates a very different dystopian society than 1984.
  - haroldp 3y ago
    "Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Censorship by itself doesn't stop people thinking (or even expressing) forbidden thoughts, it stops a person's words reaching other people. BNW had a similar effect by conditioning, rather than by applying the strong form of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
      - haroldp 3y ago
        It's not perfectly isometric, but neither is it a stretch to call it orwellian.
paradox460 3y ago
Real time translation in the speakers own voice.
- treetalker 3y ago
  While listening to the examples given, I noted the cross-language ones. I’m eager to improve my accents in my nonnative languages by cloning my voice and comparing recordings of how I do sound with how I would sound as a native speaker!
- abetusk 3y ago
  This is an exceptional use case! Mr Beast talked about translating his videos to other languages to get more reach. This can be done for people with limited budget or just in general so people can watch videos without needing subtitles. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw this incorporated into YT in the near future.
  - paradox460 3y ago
    Another really good one would be for RPGs. Instead of clumsy approaches like "Hey Dragonborn" and whatnot, they could actually say your character's name out loud.
    - abetusk 3y ago
      Right, and taking it one step further, LLMs in games with voice actors providing the basis for dynamic dialogue that sounds like it's coming from a person.

diggan 3y ago

Person A used to be able to speak, but lost their voice in a accident/because of reason Y. Luckily, there is surviving audio/video with their voice on it, so a text-to-voice with their own voice could be created for them to use.

goodluckchuck 3y ago

Possibly speech therapy. Certainly entertainment. Movies / TV. It opens a new opportunity for videogames with generative characters.

kushie 3y ago

apple has Personal Voice for accessibility

ldoughty 3y ago

From an indie game dev standpoint, I can probably say a sentence or two in a given way using my standard headset microphone.. and something like this would allow for clean voice lines fairly easily, as long as they don't need to stress too much emotion... But for a $0 game, that would still be beneficial. Imagine all the 2D Zelda/FF like games that don't get played today because people would rather listen to dialogue than read. Of course, there's also the preservation of the voice of a loved one. I would probably pay to hear my father's voice again but there"s probably only one or two VHS tapes with his voice on it.

nickpsecurity 3y ago

My pastor has an injured, vocal cord that makes him sound gritty at times. A technology like this applied to old copies of his speaking might make him sound like he used to. I don’t know if he’d use something like that since we mostly rely on the Spirit of Christ to open hearts to the truth. Outside public speakers, there’s probably other people whose lost their voice or have trouble vocalizing who might want to sound like their old selves. This could help them. Disclaimer: I think these techs will more often do damage than good. I’m just brainstorming an answer to your question.

grayhatter 3y ago

No. The real answer is yes, I could probably come up with some contrived examples, like I lost my voice in a freak LLM accident and now want to clone my old voice. But this doesn't (you don't?) really need a net benefit reason to figure it out and publish it. Because why? I assume, because "this shouldn't exist!" which is just a more palatable wa to phrase "won't someone think of the children". Society doesn't benefit from ignorance, so given it can exist, what's the problem with it existing? Why does it need a practical reason? Because people will do bad things with it? Duh, but I'd rather everyone know then just the bad guys

johnnyworker 3y ago
> Why does it need a practical reason? To at least give us something as a consolation for all the havoc all sorts of deep fakes will wreak on societies. It's like asking what a knife can be used for other than murder. It's a valid question.
- grayhatter 3y ago
  It's a valid question, but not a good one. The implication is something needs a reason to exist. This is a new technology, and just like all new technologies, the fear of it is spreading faster than the understanding. Scams aren't going away. Will this make it easier to scam some people? Absolutely, so did the internet. I'm not claiming this is anything like the internet. My argument closer to, the reason people get scammed isn't because [thing exists] it's because bad people lie, and kind people trust them. We can all wring our hands in fear over what the new technology might do, or we can solve the problems we care about. Authenticity was hard before this, and it'll be hard after.
  - johnnyworker 3y ago
    > But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live. > If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used. -- Joseph Weizenbaum That is not fear. That is being serious and unflinching, if anything. > We can all wring our hands in fear over what the new technology might do, or we can solve the problems we care about. I'm doing neither. I said it's a valid question, with which you agree. The rest is a straw man apropos nothing anyone actually said, here, and wringing your hands about it. It's a way bigger waste of time than asking a simple question and let those who want to answer that, and let those who don't want answer it simply don't answer it, instead of making up this "issue" with the question itself. > Authenticity was hard before this, and it'll be hard after. So "nothing changes", but technology is super important? You could say the same about, say, curing cancer. People will live for a while and then die, with or without it. Why since it makes no difference, what'd be the problem with "fearing" it?

abetusk 3y ago

James Earl Jones, presumably hedging against his eventual demise, has allowed his voice to be used for things like the Star Wars franchise [0]. Small, independent film makers can now use a skeleton crew to voice parts. I can't imagine it would be anything other than a niche service, but hearing the voice and, potentially, interacting with a chatbot/LLM with the voice of a passed love one. This is off the top of my head. I would also guess that this technology is a stepping stone for other weird, interesting and profoundly helpful uses. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/24/23370097/darth-vader-james-earl-jones-obi-wan-kenobi-star-wars-ai-disney-lucasfilm https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/24/23370097/darth-vader-jame...

stale2002 3y ago

Well we could just look at the obvious and existing use cases for text to speech stuff. Alexa, siri, and similar, are all common place. Another huge usecase would be anything to do with voice acting. Either in video games, cartoons, or the like. This would completely democratize voice acting material, and would empower anyone to be able to do this for cheap.

mattlondon 3y ago
... and put 99% of voice actors out of business. We'll eventually end up with every TV show, movie, and, video game being voiced by Ryan Gosling and Beyonce because market research.
- stale2002 3y ago
  Technology that makes things better, faster, and more democratized does tend to harm those who profit off of things being expensive and gatekept, yes. Democratization will always be the enemy of those who profit from preventing others from being empowered.

dqv 3y ago

If you've ever done voice prompt recordings for a phone system, voice cloning would be super helpful for doing one off tweaks, especially if you have to record a bunch. Instead of rerecording 20 messages, which can sometimes take hours, you can use a clone of your own voice to make the necessary modifications. My friend does a lot of recordings as part of his job and when I showed him the Adobe voice editing preview he got really excited. It has the potential to make tweaks a lot easier, less time consuming, and reduce voice strain.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

userbinator 3y ago

You would be able to translate media into the language of your choice, but also retaining the original voices.

cchance 3y ago

Imagine being able to handle translations live and hearing the persons voice translated as if they were speaking to you in your native language with their own voice is a big one