Neural Network synthesizes politician voices


So who were those meant to be? I guessed Hilary Clinton because one of the others referred to her, but the other two, I could only make an educated guess at best.

Also, fuck neural networks. What they mean is they built a black box and they don't know how it works, but trust us, it works. We still don't know how, but it does.
 
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Askarus said:
But it still sounds pretty artificial to me.
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Only Barack and Hillary, Donald sounds better than usual :)

With machine generated voices more often than not, the female voices seem worse to me than the male ones. Is this just my perception or are female voices somehow harder to generate?
 
"Neural network" they say. It's just HMM based speech synthesis. This has been around for decades, except their models don't seem to have been trained very well. Probably only using biphones when they should be using triphones for better realism.
 
Caine said:
With machine generated voices more often than not, the female voices seem worse to me than the male ones. Is this just my perception or are female voices somehow harder to generate?
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Probably just a result of lack of experimental training. These things usually come out of universities or even worse, tech startups, in terms of male bias at least. The same thing is currently something of a issue in the medical sciences; most drugs and remedies are only tested on male subjects, and usually young male ones at that in the early stages, and anything that doesn't work on those is discarded, ignoring the fact that females or old folks may well respond differently.

Edit: Fixing quoting furniture, hopefully
 
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Google's duplex sounds pretty lifelike, though admittedly it's far less vocabulary that you need to book an appointment/reservation. they can use male or female voices, and both sound pretty good.
 
Have you seen more than just that preprepared audio/video they had at the conference (I heard it on the radio, so I don't know if they had attached pictures or not), or are you going on that bit of fluff?
 
levi said:
Probably just a result of lack of experimental training. These things usually come out of universities or even worse, tech startups, in terms of male bias at least. The same thing is currently something of a issue in the medical sciences; most drugs and remedies are only tested on male subjects, and usually young male ones at that in the early stages, and anything that doesn't work on those is discarded, ignoring the fact that females or old folks may well respond differently.

Edit: Fixing quoting furniture, hopefully
Click to expand...

You want to go there? Ok. The alleged preferential medical treatment and research for men is a fraud. In the USA, women's diseases get over double the research money as male-specific ones. Women get more and more expensive treatment as well.

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96jun/cancer/kadar.htm

As to early drug testing differences: Here is why that happened:

"In 1977 the FDA issued guidelines that specifically excluded women with "childbearing potential" from phase 1 and early phase 2 studies; they were to be included in late phase 2 and phase 3 trials in proportion to their expected use of the medication. FDA surveys conducted in 1983 and 1988 showed that the two sexes had been proportionally represented in clinical trials by the time drugs were approved for release.

The 1977 guidelines codified a policy already informally in effect since the thalidomide tragedy shocked the world in 1962. The births of armless or otherwise deformed babies in that era dramatically highlighted the special risks incurred when fertile women ingest drugs. So the policy of excluding such women from the early phases of drug testing arose out of concern, not out of disregard, for them."

Male and Female humans share the same biochemistry. Differences due to hormonal factors exist, but are exceedingly minor. The main biological difference is pregnancy, and that is a legitimate reason to protect the unborn from testing risks.

EDIT: Now that this false claim derailing the thread has been dealt with:

Levi's inability to identify the synthesized voices as imitating Obama, Trump and Clinton's may be an indication of some degree of phonagnosia.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/he...-gives-new-insights-into-the-human-brain.html

The social ramifications of high quality speech emulation are vast. In Germany, many elderly people are victims of the 'enkeltrick', where they are called by criminals pretending to be a relative in desperate need of money. With voice emulation, such crimes (and far greater ones) become more feasible.

Voice recordings may soon become challengeable in court. Youtube videos of dissident speech could be altered.

The impact of this technology WILL BE huge.
 
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... and now... with video/images too!
so we have all the tools for declaring total war via the next hacked tv-station?
when you get caught (after world destruction?), you can blame the stupid, black-boxed ai for it! :$
 
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