Text to Speech Software Copies Any Human Voice

mindpixel writes " A New York Times Report (registration required) states that AT&T Labs will start selling speech software that it says is so good at reproducing the sounds, inflections and intonations of a human voice that it can recreate voices and even bring the voices of long-dead celebrities back to life. The software, which turns printed text into synthesized speech, makes it possible for a company to use recordings of a person's voice to utter things that the person never actually said."

Comments

Try it out!

[Mr. Sketch]

On AT&T Speech Labs website, they have a little demo where you can enter you're own text and have it play for you using their software (30 word limit). Way Cool!!

They also have recorded demos you can listen to, but I thought the interactive demo was pretty nifty.


--BEGIN SIG BLOCK--
I'd rather be trolling for goatse.cx.

There's an evil use for this too:

[AFCArchvile]

I quote from U.S. Code, Title 47, Section 227, otherwise known as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act:

"(b) (1) It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States
(B) to initiate any telephone call to any residential telephone line using an artificial or prerecorded voice to deliver a message without the prior express consent of the called party, unless the call is initiated for emergency purposes or is exempted by rule or order by the Commission under paragraph (2)(B); ..."

You hear that? There is to be no telemarketing use of this technology!

This could be useful in games.

[AFCArchvile]

Just imagine how much less space some of the more involving computer games like Half-Life and Deus Ex would take up if all the dialog was synthesized with key samples from the voice actor (or, should I say, the "phoneme source"). That saved space could be used toward other things, like textures or ambient sounds. Of course, the biggest challenge would be to allocate some processing power for the synthesis. Still, it's probably in the works.

Other Online Demos

[DaneelGiskard]

Some links to other online demos, so you can compare:

http://www.elantts.com/indemo.htm
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/userin. html
http://www.flexvoice.com/demo.html
http://www.acuvoice.com/downloads/ttsdemo.html


I searched for good TTS software to give voice to some of the 3d animations I did in max ... but I did not find anything satisfactory... :(

Movie dubbing today...

[KarmaBlackballed]

One neat application would be to dub foreign language films in the target language using the voice of the original actor even though they do not know the target language. They could start doing that today.

They could start by fixing all those old Chinese and Japanese action/monster flicks dubbed by the same guy talking in false baritone and falsetto.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~ the real world is much simpler ~~

Re:Cool... and disturbing.

[dachshund]

Actually, this isn't a very exciting thing for the blind. For most practical uses, the visually impaired tend to prefer speed over quality. It doesn't have to sound great as long as it can read several times faster than "normal" speed. The AT&T TTS isn't really designed for this purpose.

Its main use is for telephony (surprise!) but it I suppose it'll be turning up in new and exciting places.

Re:Cool... and disturbing.

[Anixamander]

What happens when you get a sample of some General's voice and then use a synthesiser to call up the poor kid on guard duty and get him to let a bunch of terrorists enter the base?

Obviously if this does happen, then all their bases...aww, forget it.
--

Doubtful.

[MarkusQ]

Match the intonation of any human voice, without a sample of that voice saying the phrase in the desired intonation, just from the text?

"Yeah, right!"

"Officer, it is clear to me that you are in fact the one who is inebriated."

"I found it that way. Honest."

"Now, nothing has really changed since the last contract, we just cleaned up a few details; Please sign and return ASAP."

"But Billy got one...why can't I? Please?"

"Would you like to move to the sofa?"

I don't buy it for a minute. To do what they claim would require real AI(tm).

-- MarkusQ

Entropy-licious

[Nihilanth]

Well kids, say goodbye to phone taps, voice mail, and important business being conducted over the phone. If this technology really accomplishes what the above says, Voice recordings wouldnt be able to hold up in court because..well..it would be difficult/impossible to proove that they were really recordings of the persons voice.

Of course, i don't think this kind of techonology should be "outlawed" or "restricted", that will only make it easier to be used maliciously, as with any technological advancement.

Another interesting point of interest is with the new Final Fantasy: spririts within movie, actors are beginning to consider copyrighting their likenesses, since they can be reproduced on a computer with frightening quality and clarity. Perhaps this applies to voice reproduction as well.

This sounds like a very beneficial technology, especially for games, where a high-quality voice synth could replace volumes of digitally recorded and compressed audio files..but it opens the door for some really frightening possabilities of fraud, social engineering, and copywrite side-stepping.