Hacker News Reader

Comment by 101008 | Hacker News Reader

I tried ElevenLabs and it is truly amazing. You don't need much audio to train it and the final result can be incredible. I shared some of the snippets with friends and relatives and after the intitial scare (same as John) we agreed that the outcome wouldn't be different than a few years ago...

We had impersonators for decades, so what have stopped political parties to hire an impersonator to create fake audios? The IA in this case is going to make it more accesible, but in political parties you don't want thousands of fake audios (they would lose credibility), you need only one.

Also, photoshopping photos would have a similar effect, and that technique has been available for years as well.

View on HN

The difference is the scale, speed, and cost. You have to at least find an impersonator who can do a passable impersonation of the target, which may be a tall order. They can't impersonate everyone perfectly, and the really good ones are probably busy and/or expensive. Anyone can use this. Kids could use it.

Is it? The examples given in the OP are remarkably uninspired, specifically mentioning "a recording of Joe Biden forgetting his own name or what year it is, or Kamala Harris claiming to be running an abortion clinic." At that level of course you can already easily find a high-quality impersonator if you wanted to.

What kinds of stuff are kids going to use this for that is dangerous? Fake their parents to call in sick to school?

The point isn't that kids will get up to no good, it's that literally anyone can use it. Cheaply, easily, quickly, effectively. Tell you what, you hire an impersonator to say naughty things as 10 high profile people, and I'll use AI to do the same and we can compare results!

How does ElevenLabs perform for dialogues with emotions? Like for movies, TV shows and games?

My impression about these voice generators was they're only good for Youtube tutorials and such. It was 2 years ago tho, I wonder how things changed.

I put some Shakespeare into the test on their main page and it was surprisingly good at times. Hearing an AI emote "Out, out, brief candle!" makes me feel strange. This has to replace voice actors in gaming at least. You could change the text as needed and perhaps just add some hints to get the emotion you want.

I feel these kinds of tools really need a way to put "emotional clue" besides text. Just like the instructions that you give to the voice actors. I don't think force the writer to put all the subtle emotional clues as explicit dialogue text is a good idea.

What I have read people do is that they prime the text with something obviously emotional before hand, including punctuation, before their desired output. They then trim the audio they want to remove the prime phrase.

So something along the lines of:

"Remove this audio because it makes me super angry! Very angry! Now I say what I want to keep!"

Just having the AI read a script is often not enough alone without post processing and manipulation, often it is somewhat flat

The samples are amazing, but it doesn't support other languages yet? And you have to pay to try clone a voice via sample MP3/4 file. Also, I hope it supports more payment methods later e.g. Paypal, for one time fee.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com