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Comment by sonantic | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN - Zeena Qureshi (Co-Founder and CEO at Sonantic) here.

Thanks for your thoughts and feedback thus far! I'd be happy to answer questions (within reason) about our latest cry demo / emotional TTS! Feel free to fire away on this thread.

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Saw your YouTube videos a few days ago and was very impressed.

Clearly you can't give away too much on your "secret sauce" but is there any insight you could share on two questions:

1. Do the individual voice talents need to express the emotion types you use or can you layer it on after? (ie do they have to have recorded say "happy" to get happy outputs or can that be added to neutral recordings retrospectively)

2. What are the ball park audio amounts you need per voice? 10 hrs, 20 hrs or more?

Hey! Thanks so much. Yea, can't go into too much detail here, but I will say that more def isn't always better when it comes to the size of datasets. :) We aim for quality over quantity in order to achieve natural expressiveness from our actor recording sessions.

> more def isn't always better when it comes to the size of datasets

This sentiment definitely gives you lots of credibility, only those who have seriously endeavored in this space are able to acknowledge just how true this is.

It's quite antithetical to how some ML folks like to think.

Hi Zeena,

Are you looking to make this accessible (read: affordable) for small time content creators / hobbyists? What sort of pricing model can we expect (one time license fee / subscription)?

It looks and sounds awesome!

Hey sorry for the delay on this. Our pricing model hasn't been published as of yet, but yes, we do aim to make the technology accessible to all levels of creators in the future.

From the first moment of our life we express emotions with voice. Not only that - adults understand them. I can express my own emotions without words. And I can change my mood by singing.

So the question is - what's there? Is it formants? Is it universal? Can we map them like syllables?

And music, it touches same emotions. Does it use same mechanism?

Edit: found "Emotional speech synthesis: Applications, history and possible future" [1], looks like melody is part of emotion processing.

If mapping is possible I'd love to see application in dubbing. Both as translate and TTS with mapped emotions and dubbing actors evaluation/autotune.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268260426_EMOTIONAL...

You have the perfect name for someone making emotive machines.

Would you do demos for well known speeches/texts? It'd be easier to put this into context that way.

Thank you! We think our name is pretty great too :) Sonantic only creates AI voice models with the consent of the artist/voice owner. We take misuse and copyright infringement very seriously and therefore never train on data (voice recordings) where the original source is unaware of its repurpose. That said, we aim to include more recognisable voices on our platform in the future.

Is there really a copyright issue? Mimicry artists and tribute bands have duplicated original voices without a problem. Technically, you are not reproducing any recording owned by anyone. It's brand new synthesis! It would be interesting to see if any courts rules this is not the case. You can own your spoken speech, but can you really own spectrogram of wave patterns?

I'm sure as a startup, that's not a legal battle that is worth the risk. Judiciary activism is not worth it for them.

Hey Zeena Amazing Intro. Are you the also a developer on the project?

Hey Zeena, great to see this on HN - brilliant video!

Thanks so much!! We really appreciate it.

What was your role in co-founding the company? No offense but it seems like John is the one who engineered the technology.

"No offense but" - really? Again with that? Just be straight with what you mean.

I don't know either of the co-founders, but it seems like a logical, good idea to have a pair of co-founders where one is technical and the other is non-technical (maybe marketing, or sales, or very strong soft skills, etc).

Hence, I don't see the issue you (obviously) have with only one person having done the technical work. Is there any context you're not telling?

The burden of getting a startup off the ground is centered around engineering, design, and actually getting your hands dirty and building the product.

As an engineer, I've been approached by those experienced in sales and offer me to build a mutually agreed upon product that we agreed would make money for equity. I would like to know if this model works. If so, how does it work? Is this common?

You can take offense if you like, but if you meet a guy at an entrepreneur conference who already built a prototype, you're not a co-founder.

You're making a mistake many engineers make in thinking that getting a startup off the ground is all about engineering. Frankly, engineering is often the easy part, and I say that as an engineer who co-founded a tech heavy successful venture backed startup. The hardest thing is choosing a compelling product and then selling it to paying customers. If you think business people undervalue techies, don't make the same mistake by under-valuing business people.

If you read my comment, I said "building the product".

The burden of building a startup is centered around getting people to believe a product is worth a damn.

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