This Voice Doesn't Exist – Generative Voice AI

Hey Piotr - just wanted to say congratz for the awesome work so far man. The quality is genuinely unbelievable. I don't know if you guys are ready to take clients at scale, but I don't see any reason why all newsletter creators wouldn't use your tech right now to address whole new markets. I'll be following the journey, excited for what's to come.

Maybe I'm late to the party -- but this [1] graphic is great in the linked article.

Could the designer share a little about how it was made? Does it represent one of the generated voices, or is it just 'artistic'? (both are cool, I think).

[1] https://blog.elevenlabs.io/content/images/2023/01/Sequence-0...

The voices are really amazing, I couldn't really tell that they are synthetic and I was looking for it.

The only issue is that the actual recordings sound like they have been overcompressed, or poorly recorded - is there any way to improve this? Something like superresolution, but for voice?

What is your business model? How are you deciding who gets Beta access? What does the voice generation interface look like?

Hi! Are your models english only, or do you plan on tackling other languages?

Any time I see AI model news on hn nowadays, my first question is whether I can run it locally, and if not, what are the alternatives that I can run locally.

That’s because you’re running tortoise on a CPU. It does about a sentence a minute on my 3090 gpu. It’s also quite good if you pick “high quality” and train it with 10 sec clips at the framerate and bitrate it asks for.

You could try https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

What kind of personal adult content do you generate? We are curious for details

My YouTube feed is currently filled with videos of whitehats hacking into Indian scam call centers.

Most of the time, the giveaway is the callers' Indian accent. If you could simply type into a box and speak with an American accent, it would be really hard to get caught.

We're opening a pandora's box here if I'm honest. I'm hardly one for pro-regulation, but good God, we're playing with things here that can really hurt us down the line.

>As impressive as a lot of these models are, I can't help but feel like they're going to end up making an incredible amount of sterile soulless content that makes everyone's lives worse.

My sentiments exactly. I think it's a bit of column A and a bit of column B. I'm reminded of the quote "everything has its pleasure and its price". The more expensive things are to produce, the the less of it there will be, but what is produced will be higher quality across the board. The less expensive it becomes to produce, the more of it will be, and the aggregate quality will be lower.

It's not always a bad thing, but the downsides are plain to see when you look at the amount of spam and low-effort content out there. That said, we've all massively enjoyed the upsides too, so it's a balancing act. I think where things were at before the recent wave generative AI tools was perhaps right on the sweet spot of "it's democratized enough that anyone can have a go, but still requires effort and a degree of talent to do well". The knowledge (and entertainment) I've been able to access thanks for randoms on YouTube is pretty incredible, and I sort of always just accepted the avalanche of spam and clickbait that came with it.

These new tools potentially push that effort/reward ratio to the point where the signal/noise ratio simply gets too high. Of course the "make money online" community is all over this stuff and today I watched a video of a guy showing how you could supposedly clone courses on Udemy using ChatGPT and other tools etc. The problem is the "course" would literally consist of generic advice, high-level information on a particular topic that suffices only as a very surface level introduction and isn't enough to help you build any functional skills in that domain, so it's effectively useless. The only person it's not useless to is him and as he would pocket a cool $5-ish per sale. It was somewhat sad and somewhat sick to hear him cackling away about being able to con people out of money while passing himself off as an expert.

And yet, it's entirely what I would expect would happen.

I agree with this completely. Technology has always made us trade quality for low-quality quantity in exchange for convenience. People now interact more through technology which removes a lot of body language and other enriching experiences.

The most dangerous aspect of this is that each step seems relatively harmless: right now, ChatGPT and DALL-E are amusements, but each small step is building a monstrous and as you say, soulless machine that overloads us so much that we will forget what it's like to even be human.

I firmly believe (and I have given this a lot of thought) that technology is ultimately evil, and that tech companies are trading short term gain of enormous wealth for the very essence of humanity, preying upon the basic instincts of individuals who are also trading their personal worth for convenience.

If I could have one single wish fulfilled in this world, it would be that every single human being gain a natural and instinctual revulsion for advanced technology. If someone asked me what disease was the worst that ever plagued humanity, it would not be smallpox or the flu or COVID, it would be the tech company.

But at the same time, there are tons of positive uses for things like this too. Imagine being a creator who wants to share their interests with the world, but hates their own voice or doesn't have the confidence to speak on camera. You could make a lot of people's lives better by creating content for YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, etc, but you wouldn't be brave enough to otherwise.

Something like this could be incredible for those people. A natural sounding alternative to text to speech for people who dislike how they sound.

And it could also be used to anonymise people in documentaries about serious topics (like say, organised crime) without actors, letting people bring the atrocities of said folks to light without need to trust others or the risk of being found out.

Other examples could include vTubers, artists creating characters for TV shows, films and video games, etc.

All technology can be abused, and sadly with how humanity acts, like will by a small percentage of the population. But for every person abusing it for dubious purposes, there are dozens or hundreds or thousands of others who can make the world better with it.

I am with you on this one. What defines us as a people is the ability to enjoy shared social experiences. The more tailored and personalized an experience becomes the more it isolates us. We don't (at least I am my social circle) speak about TikTok's the way we speak about YouTube videos.

But more importantly, boredom triggers innovation. As we are consuming ourselves to death, we might lose the ability to truly create. Maybe that's why the last 20 years of content feel quite generic and sterile.

I think we already have a lot of soulless human generated search results.

I think there will be need for a greater level of filtering and curation yes, but I see it as an opportunity both for creators and curators.

The barriers to entry for media creation will go down, but with saturation also the already low margins of profit will get worse.

> As impressive as a lot of these models are, I can't help but feel like they're going to end up making an incredible amount of sterile soulless content that makes everyone's lives worse.

Eh. I’ll take a MAYBE over the past 10 years or more of the human driven social media manipulations and scams and poison. We’ve made almost literally fucking nothing of value in a decade. It’s been ads, Ponzi schemes, and a race to the bottom of tolerance.

I’ll take the democratization of content. Knowing that it will allow the good and the bad.

… so how it different from the radio or TV or “influencers” now? I have limited time to consume media and am not going to be less picky when it gets easier for people to make garbage.

I’m hopeful that, as with most apocalypse-capable technologies, humans will adapt and overcome.

Humans will be different on the other side of this coming wave of simulation indistinguishable from reality, but we’ll be okay.

It’ll suck living through the transition though. Not looking forward to the crap tsunami on the horizon.

But as a species, we’ll adapt and survive as always.

That's a pretty high bar. Even most Hollywood productions can't afford Meryl Streep, let alone a new site, podcast, or video game.

From wikipedia:

Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep [is] often described as "the best actress of her generation." Streep is particularly known for her versatility and accent adaptability. She has received numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over five decades, including a record 21 Academy Award nominations, winning three, and a record 32 Golden Globe Award nominations, winning eight. She has also received two British Academy Film Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three Primetime Emmy Awards, in addition to nominations for a Tony Award and six Grammy Awards.

Maybe it's because I haven't heard the source material, but that Conversational voice really appeals to me. I wish my phone and assistants used that voice.

(and also I can't wait for a "real" ChatGPT-era AI to go with it, to put those braindead jokes of an "assistant" Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant out to pasture)

Let's talk about this "Narrative" example.

When I listened to it, my first impression was that it must be the real actor they included for comparison purposes but that they failed to label it correctly. I thought it is not machine-generated. I couldn't tell the slightest artifact except what sounded like a low-bitrate sound encoding (maybe using a codec geared toward speech). Can you tell anything "off" about it?

As for the encoding artifact such as a tinny sound or low-bitrate sound, that is the type you hear on an MP3 or low bitrate codec for speech. For example, when I record a message on https://vocaroo.com/ the "premier" voice recording service it sounds 10x worse. Here is a sample I just recorded of my own speech: https://voca.ro/18oSJ1sHU5w5

After my first impression that the narrative example might be a real human mislabelled for comparison purposes, I listened to the next two, labelled News and Conversational. I found these very easy to tell as AI-generated.

Thinking back to why I found the narrative example so compelling, I thought perhaps the issue is that the first example is in British English which I'm less used to than American English. I grew up in the United States. Perhaps since the accent doesn't match my own, it is harder for me to perceive it as generated.

-> Can a native speaker of British English tell us whether listening to the first example you can tell in any way that it is a robot? Maybe it is as obvious to you as the next two are to me.

Still, I've listened to a fair amount of British English in my life so perhaps there is an alternative explanation for why the first one was better. For example, it could have been trained on a reader's voice who has narrated thousands of hours in very high studio quality in a fairly consistent way, leaving this type of text much easier to synthesize than the other two examples due to more training data or higher-quality audio.

For me, the first one is really indistinguishable from a narrator's true voice, though it does sound a bit tinny which could also happen as an artifact of the recording process.

In terms of "how confident are you that this is a real person" the second two examples I would put at 0 - it's totally obvious that it is not a real person, whereas the first one sounds like a 10 to me: obviously a real narrator. (With a bit of artifacting that sounds like an mp3.)

[1] The text is here https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/19/books/chapters/the-lord-o...

Agreed, the intro and narrative ones are great. The news one is terrible.

I don’t know how many of the solutions offer this, but there is a markup language for TTS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_Synthesis_Markup_Langua...

Amazon Polly, (which seems kind of ancient with all these new solutions showing up) has supported SSML for some time.

AWS Polly SSML docs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/ssml.html

ElevenLabs dev here - we believe this is a 2 step process and agree it is needed!

First, we want to the quality you get out-of-the-box to already by brilliant by taking context into account. Granted, that gets you sometimes 98% there and are working to add manipulation possibility to get you to that 100%; for long-texts though the quality you get is great.

For second part, currently TTS providers give complicated toggles that frequently don't affect the speech in the way you want. Initially we are adding a basic SSML-like support and have a more robust language-based idea which we hope will come over the next few months!

> I feel like this is a huge unnecessary roadblock holding back this kind of technology.

There are speech synthesis markup languages, like SSML. And targeting even lower level has always been possible with commercial speech engines.

Think about how tedious and time consuming it is to mark up a large amount of copy? Unless we’re talking about little hints here and there (which is also doable) it rapidly becomes more cost effective to just pay for voice talent. For this stuff to be appealing it really must be close to fire and forget.

Just my 2 cents, but it seems to me that too little focus in the tech world has been spent on understannding what speech is. Tonality, mood, facial expression and body language all is ignored or people pretend like there are no such thing. I believe this is broadly true in western society by now- people went digital but do not yet realize why communication went to hell in the last decade.

I used to work in automotive navigation. Other colleagues handled our voice systems, but I do remember all our prompts were written in SSML[1] with varrying amounts of specificity. We would use Lua to configure and customize the SSML, including some custom extensions for different voice renderers.

Even with the prompts marked up, there were huge differences between products. Some car OEMs would pay higher fees for better voice and some wouldn't. It's fairly tedious work and difficult to scale as the amount of sentences grows. We basically built up a catalog over many years and they were always explicitly stated as part of our requirements docs. Of course the renderers could say anything you wanted but letting it free form was so a big risk from a product point of view.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_Synthesis_Markup_Lang...

There's lots of text and audio already without this, that's probably the key factor practically. Similarly then for use cases, converting text that already exists is much more approachable than creating new marked up text.

Tortoise lets you add prompts into the text like [I am angry] which modifies the voice interestingly.

There's a pretty advanced Mac OS speech markup language, I wrote about it here: https://www.mattmontag.com/personal/mac-os-x-speech-synthesi...

Going back further, there was also a prosody markup for Sound Blaster speech synthesis (Dr. Sbaitso, anyone?).

I think markup would always be more work and less effective than using your own voice input to guide its tone.

I work in TTS and i just dont believe this. If these really are random text and not trained on literally the copy they are reading, with no correction I would be surprised. Also, our competitors have good voices but they also take ages to produce. Maybe these really are legit but take like 1 minute to produce or something. So while this is impressive, i doubt that in practice this would be this high quality and could even approach real time

The key will be authenticity and trust. And in the world where the percentage of online content that contains this ends up in the vast minority of content, in person expertise and meetings will have to make a return out of sheer necessity.

It's starting to very much feel like we're entering the age of information manipulation outlined in the Ghost in the Shell TV series. Except it isn't a 90's/00's depiction of the future, it's just with far less robots and prosthetics and a lot more mundane.

I just keep coming back to the scene where they have satellite video footage of a nuclear submarine preparing for a nuclear attack and the discussion lamenting that it's just video, nobody will believe it as evidence.

I think you are overestimating the capabilities of ai to create novel content ,high genuine quality content will be always there ,but amount of bs content will increase

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I’m looking forward to NPCs having dynamic responses with real voices

Doesn't have to be prerecorded, just trained

Imagine if in-game voice chat automatically converted a % of guys voices into girls voices, so they would start getting harassed, realize how awful that is, and then over time stop doing it.

Imagine if all POC wear white people body suits, that would solve racism !

That's just kind of a lame workaround that doesn't tackle the actual issue though.

Not only voice actors, include radio hosts, documentary/news content, any voice over for anything, as well as imitation of familiar voices.

The "budget advantage" doesn't matter in the top half of the industry; directing a human voice talent is not going away anytime soon.

Budget clients are suspicious of AI voices and feel "cheated" if they think someone they hired are using one. This will change fastest.

The laughing examples are pretty impressive.

"The first AI that can laugh" - https://blog.elevenlabs.io/the_first_ai_that_can_laugh/

There are so many uses cases for this, even with the current quality. Many game developers dream of having something like this.

I thought the Narrative one was 100% there. I'd still give the News one 99% and Conversational 98%.

> Good to know that voice actors will have jobs for a while longer…

They don’t have to work anymore, just sell their voice and sit at home collecting royalty payments is the future according the TFA.

And they’ve been making progress on the roboticness with every new model that comes out. Just a matter of time (and data) for the AIs to figure out how words string together naturally.

The random voice generator is pretty bad but sometimes you actually get a reasonably good voice except you can hear clicking sounds that interrupt the voice.

Yeah right. You would never pass a blind test on this.

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