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Comment by hobbitstan | Hacker News Reader

I tested a few recordings of an Indian Swami giving speeches in English back in the 70's. Recording had a lot of background noise, not great. You have to listen very carefully to hear what is being said. I was hoping for good results, but...

Results:

- background noise was reduced

- some previously clear words are turned into garbled non-words

- some parts are replaced by a different Indian voice, I assume AI, so it sounds like multiple people talking

All in all, the results are not anywhere near what the sample shows.

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Time is a flat circle. Remember when Xerox copiers would randomly replace digits with different digits?

https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/6/4594482/xerox-copiers-rand...

Well, that’s a nightmare I never knew existed…

Epic talk (in German, David Kriesel, "Traue keinem Scan, den du nicht selbst gefälscht hast"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FeqF1-Z1g0

Watched it two times! It is very well made and funny!

They should've added english subtitles by now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0O6UXrOZJo

Good news: This fancy new compression reduces the error rate from 5% to 1% for the same file size

Bad news: While the 5% was a minor inconvenience for customers, the 1% is bad enough to end your company

I love it how they say "yeah, character substitution is a known issue". How was that ever fine?

Close the ticket. My performance review scorecard doesn't include "known issues"

Hi there, I have made a free open-source tool that does better. Care you check that out? https://github.com/shahules786/mayavoz

This is very neat! Have you done any profiling on what codecs and sample rates this performs best on?

Just curious how the performance differs between PCMU @ 8khz compared to Opus @ 48k or IMBE and AMBE+2 (Project 25 Public Safety audio codecs) :D

My dream would be doing audio processing in real time to clean up the audio of phone calls

Hi, most models performs best at 16KHz. Current architectures does not support real-time speech enhancement but I plan to add that in future.

Honestly, it sounds like you're judging on a pretty big outlier example. The sample seems to more be aimed at background noise and even that sample is extremely easy to understand without the enhancement. There are a bunch of tools out there that are probably better aimed at your goals.

In time, these tools will gain control knobs and eventually start to focus on longer tail audio recovery tasks. I have hope for our old audio. Where there's signal, there's a way.

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