Hacker News Reader

Comment by dwoozle | Hacker News Reader

This industry seems like it could be put out of business on the low to mediocre end by deep learning.

Despite advances in deep learning, it's still very easy to tell a TTS voice from a human voice. Even companies like Apple that has paid special attention[0] to the naturalness of TTS can't get it completely.

Also, did you notice that in all major animated films (think Disney or Pixar), while the imagery are all computer-generated, the voices are not?

[0]: https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/08/06/siri-voices.htm...

So far, I think this is a matter of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWK_iYBl8cA impresses me and it just feels like a low quality recording.

It's concerning given how computing power and resources advance over time.

check the same kind of work out of Lyrebird team

[1] https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai

And more from Adobe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw

and an unnamed start-up a while back: http://web.archive.org/web/20190803012012/https://instaud.io...

I use Apple's TTS to read books. It may not sound like a human, but after a few hours of listening to it the strange nature of the voice gets abstracted away by your brain. It's very functional. I knocked out Neal Stephenson's Anathem a week ago in about two days using TTS to read probably 75% of it.

What it doesn't do is the acting. In an audiobook, the voice actor will change their voice in various ways for dramatic effect, and in that respect the book becomes something like a radio drama. With TTS you're getting "just the book". I think that's the major difference and the refuge in which voice actors might hope for continued employment.

The audible audiobook version of Anathem is extremely good in my opinion. Probably one of my favorite readings... I’m surprised that speech synthesis does a reasonable job given the language involved.

The Audible version of The Baroque Cycle is one of the best voice performances I've heard.

Having said that, some fairly small scale audiobooks that have the authors narrating them are also very good as you can hear the interest and the passion of the author in their subject:

e.g.

https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Wilding-Audiobook/B07DDMZ16R

https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Exactly-Audiobook/B07CQ3RPKC

I can imagine using TTS to catch up on news articles, magazine articles, reviewing a textbook, maybe even listening to opinion columns while out on the go or multitasking with my Photoshop time, but I can't imagine it doing anything except ruining a novel, or anything else involving drama or comedy.

Far from ruining novels, it's quite pleasant. After you've become accustomed to it, it becomes a very low-fatigue way to read for extended periods of time. I find books read by TTS are just as immersive as reading print. In fact the experience of TTS and reading print seem closer to me than print vs audiobooks.

I guess what I'm saying is don't underestimate neuroplasticity. I wager you could even achieve casual fluency with morse code if you listened to it long enough. I'm under the impression that some telegraph operators did.

That's really interesting. Basically the audiobook is more of an interpretation of the text. It's perhaps closer to a movie adaptation. Once you lose the exception for the TTS to "tell you a story" but rather to "tell you the words", it becomes just a different input stream. I didn't think about it like that until now. I'll give it a try.

I do this as well. I used Samsung's TTS engine at first, but Google's has mostly caught up. As a bonus, I can switch between listening (in the car or working out) and reading (most other times) without losing my place.

I listen to a lot of non-fiction in TTS but I haven't found it all that satisfactory for novels. Although part of the reason is if I'm listening to a novel via TTS it's because there isn't an audiobook available and I've had to do some hacky OCR to get the text in the first place.

Here's why I think animated films are done like that.

The best/only way to get most of that computer-generated imagery is by huge amounts of manual labour: designing, animating, simulating, sometimes motion-capturing. It's painstaking detail work involving many people.

The best way to get the voices is with a small amount of manual labour: voice acting.

If you put as much manual effort as the imagery into controlling the nuances of a TTS engine, you might get acceptable results, but it's far easier and cheaper to use voice actors. In fact, the easiest way to tell a TTS engine exactly what you want would probably be to voice act and have it mimic you. This might be worth trying to do if remapping vocal anatomy (e.g. woman voicing man or vice versa, or monster, etc.), but for most purposes it's easier to hire appropriate voice actors and/or manipulate the vocal recording audio than to use it to drive a resynthesis by simulation.

Also, it is a way to get A-list celebs involved and cash in on their popularity.

Maybe someday we will see (or hear) Siri's voice star in one of those Disney flicks.

Or the Japanese voice idols?

Vocaloids?

Those are deliberately made to sound unnatural. Not to say it changes anything, and they've already shown up once or twice in anime.

(Though the only example I can name off the bat is Black Rock Shooter, and that doesn't include the voice. It's complicated. Mato is complicated, too.)

Weird example since Siri is based on one real woman's voice. Maybe one of the WaveNet "personalities" might be a better example.

It costs 100s of millions of dollars to animate and market a feature Pixar film. It would be very penny-wise/pound-foolish to try to skimp on voice-acting. Animated films will be the last place to start using TTS. Honestly they might ADR people in low budget live-action with TTS before it reaches the major animation studios.

> Animated films will be the last place to start using TTS.

Well, big budget theatrical animated films from major studios like Pixar or DreamWorks, sure.

But most animated films aren't those.

The imagery is computer generated because it is the cheaper solution compared to hand-drawn animation.

I don't know... whilst I'm not an audio book fan myself, people who are fans seem very sensitive to different audiobook performers. For example, James Marsters wasn't able to read a single book in the Dresden Files series, and lots of fans quickly noticed and complained.

It's similar to saying that voice actors (and then actual visual actors) will soon be out of business because we can soon 'automate' that too...

Voice (audiobook) acting is a _performance_, not a routine task to tick the "available on Audible" box.

I was just about to post this when I saw your comment. Yeah, when we accidentally got the non-Marster's (still good) audiobook my wife and I were immediately like "this is not right". Master's is the only audiobook personality I know and is talked about by fans all the time (think he used to be in Buffy).

For anyone who hasn't ever read the Dresden Files, it is a fantasy series set in modern Chicago with a young wizard way in over his head. The series starts off kinda bleh with the first few books, but steadily picks up pace as the main character gets more involved with all the crazy things going on. The author puts basically every single (ok a lot) of diverse mythologies as if it is all real (Odin, Mab, Erlking, Skinwalkers, Trolls, the Fae, Necromancers, 4 different kinds of Vampires, Roman Gods, the White God, Angels, Demons, Lucifer, Dragons, Cthulhu, and about a dozen other bad and good things all with a single coherant plot. The main character starts to see that all of these major supernatural entities are moving their armies like 3D chess. The characters take some time to develop, but are seriously good.

next book when

Peace Talks is supposed to be in December or January I think. He has been wrapping up the editing since September.

The dresden files subreddit has one of the author's beta readers that sends us some updates although no spoilers of course. She says it will be as big of a whammy as "Changes".

There was also a new Goodman Gray shirt story released recently.

Oh man I cant wait! thanks for the update

Solid example. That lone book using a separate narrator was jarring. I agree with the performance aspect. It will take general AI to understand timing of a joke, or pausing for drama. One must literally understand the text to deliver a good narration. I don't expect to see AI capable of that in my life.

Marsters did eventually record that book. I listened to the original and definitely missed his reading of the book. I felt the other reader did a decent job (way better than most readers), but Marsters simply does a masterful job.

You mean a "Marster-ful" job ;-)

Peter Kenny is the narrator for most of Iain Banks' Culture series. Hearing a different narrator for Matter just felt off, I've come to associate Peter's accent with the setting.

Most I could see it do is to allow voice actors change their voice, using it by itself is not feasible because DL doesn't know where to put emphasis, where to speed up and slow down, it doesn't sound emotional. I don't know who would like to have their book read by monotone voice. Maybe it could voice dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Tbh that doesn't sound like a particularly troublesome task. Super-set the language with some new accents, symbols, and new punctuation markers and then off you go.

Hate to break it to you, but injecting human emotion into speech is more than just putting intonation and punctuation in the right place.

I read the parent post as suggesting that the appropriate "acting" cues and emphasis might be explicitly annotated in the text just as the intonation and punctuation in normal text.

However, I'd guess that it's simply quicker and more efficient for someone to just properly act and speak the lines with a dramatic effect and any explicit annotation of how exactly they should be said takes much more time and effort.

If anything it could be _improved_ by deep learning. Shitty narrators will disappear, and we'll get high production values audiobooks instead, assuming humans want to get paid, a-la Dune, where there's an entire cast of well selected voice actors narrating the book, and the result is amazing.

Depends whether by "the industry" you mean "businesses making audiobooks" or "people working as audiobook narrators."

Let's put it this way: it's difficult for me to find the time to even listen to an excellently narrated audiobook. I'm not going to listen to something narrated by a machine without intonation if I can avoid it. But I had to suffer through one book (Disciplined Entrepreneurship, if you must know) where narration was so bad I wanted to drive my car into a tree more than once. Those guys will be replaced with a machine. The rest have nothing to worry about. The people described in the article are clearly far above anything machines will be able to do in the foreseeable future. Their professional work is closer to that of a theater actor than it is to reading the book.

I agree. I once put down an audiobook (Xenocide or Children of the mind, don't remember which one) because I couldn't stand one of the voice actors. She did a Japanese accent so overdone, it was so bad that I just skipped all those sections of the story.

Having the choice between a monotone narration and the voice actors in this case would be a much welcome improvement.

Oh yep. I listened to a full cast reading of The Man of Legends by Kenneth Johnson a couple of months ago and the narration was pretty good on the most part. There was a section that was told from the point of view of a young Hispanic girl and I couldn't understand much of it all. Really annoying.

At least one of the narrators (who were all American) did a Chinese accent for some sections of Xenocide, and I felt that was the wrong move, considering that the characters were speaking to each other in their native language, not Chinese characters speaking English.

Maybe using this technology posted here a few days ago?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21525878

Low to mediocre? There's more than enough existing audio files for specific voice actors to give it the Deepfakes treatment and synthesize the voices accurately. Of course, that's just voice synthesization, for stories they would have to be able to do different voices for different characters and be able to understand context and emotional moods and the like.

Sounds like AI would basically make the low to mediocre end of the business _exist_ at all, it really, really hard to find audiobooks of some lesser known stuff and I hate having to use TTS because it's awful, but if TTS sounded like that one demo Google did of their AI appointment booking service for Pixel, I'd be way less unhappy about it.

There's a lot of spam already in this regard, e.g. on youtube where there's bots posting machine spoken textbooks or wiki pages.

That's just ghastly spam content designed to generate advertising income,

I am not sure if some of the brands advertising on YouTube realise what crap inventory their adverts are being run on.

Look up deepzen

Reply on news.ycombinator.com