product.supertone.ai
I would like some clarity on the Terms of Service clause 4:
> The content created using Supertone Shift remains your property. However, by using our Services, you grant Supertone a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, adapt, and display content solely for the purpose of operating and improving Supertone Shift. This license does not grant Supertone any rights to sell or distribute your content.
Does Supertone Shift need the user content in order to further improve the product during the beta period?
Or does it need the user content in normal operation (for example, running the conversion on remote servers vs local processing)?
I can see some hesitation from people if you're recording everything they say, and keeping that recording for an indefinite period of time.
I can appreciate that there may be a problem enforcing a "Don't use our product for evil" clause, if you can review usage.
The challenge here seems overwhelming.
we may need your data for some unspecified purpose ("AI model training") that we can't even dream of right now, so we'll just take all the rights
Commercial applications like Voice.Ai and Koe are real time and have celebrity and anime voices respectively.
The RVC ecosystem on GitHub has dozens of different real time open source voice changers. I haven't kept up with the SOTA, but they're incredible, fine tunable, and 100% local.
They all use like 50% of my cpu to get real time. I was able to get actual low latency with koi, but still massive cpu usage. And theres no community of models for it either.
Perhaps someone who really knows what theyre doing could optimize these open source models but its not me
Could you share the repo?
I just made some modifications to run it as a stream from a microphone. I am trying to develop my own voice changer (https://voicechange.io) so I dont want to share the source code for that.
That being said, I hate "remains your property" part. It's just fluff that changes nothing, but distracts from the following sentence.
"Remains your property" is not fluff at all, and explicitly disclaims any ownership of rights associated with content you post, and equivalently indemnifies users against any liability for re-posting or re-using content they posted here, which they'd potentially be exposed to if they were assigning copyright to the hosting platform rather than just granting a license.
Neat looking service though.
It boils down to "we're not claiming to own the rights to your content -- you still retain those -- but we need a grant of permission from you to ensure that we can publish it on our own site without facing possible liability".
This isn't specifically an issue with this service alone (I like it), but the approach to UGC (user generated content) in general.
What's unclear is what rights or license remain if someone deletes their account and content. It's trivial to clarify, making omission is a decision.
Use of the word "improving" is pretty general and broad, and can be about the priorities of the vendor over the customer.
What's missing is the clause that closes the loop and doesn't give them a lifetime license.
"you grant Supertone a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, adapt, and display content solely for the purpose of operating and improving Supertone Shift."
It's certainly proper to call out examples of actual bad behavior by specific organizations, but not so much to treat defensive boilerplate as though it is itself bad behavior.
I think that should not be necessary to do explicitly because it is the default state. At any rate it is weird to talk about IP assignment in the very same paragraph as licensing.
I would love to test the technology without the risk of damaging my computer!
In fact, it was Supertone Shift's installer that prodded me to seek it out (I happened to find and install Shift a couple of weeks ago).
In this case, it needs admin permissions to install to `/Library/Application Support` as well as `/Library/Audio`.
It needs to restart in order for the HAL driver to be loaded (this provides the virtual audio interface for using the app with Teams, Zoom, etc.)
The preinstall/postinstall scripts simply handle the app's directory in Application Support.
I decided it was safe enough, and had some fun playing with it. It contacts what it claims are licensing servers (when it starts), and won't start without it. It wanted to keep contacting those servers constantly, but blocking its network access via Little Snitch didn't prevent it from functioning. The network traffic was in the single-digit kilobyte range, so I felt reasonably confident no audio data was being looted.
https://esports.gg/news/valorant/male-valorant-pros-face-sex...
> The experiment showed just how drastically a woman’s voice can impact the score of a player. One male pro played with his normal voice and earned 15 kills with two deaths. When playing Valorant with a female voice, his score almost completely inversed with three kills and 16 deaths after the other players refused to cooperate in the game.
> The pro players also endured being mocked and insulted with sexist slurs. Many will recognize this as the average experience of women in gaming. During their games, one male teammate told a pro to go back to the kitchen. Likewise, another teammate told the female-voiced pro that “all women should just die.”
To help clarify: The Gold Nova Master rank is like 60th percentile. GE is 99th.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/online-gaming-in-20...
Sibling comment source makes a more compelling case for why women receive more abuse than me.
> Of this 30%, the majority (72%) said the abuse was misogynistic. By comparison, none of the male respondents reported any gender-based discrimination or abuse
You: Why? I already own a 2002 Ford Escape...
I'm not trying to make fun of you, I think you actually have a unique and impressive perspective! I've always hated hearing my voice on answering machines, so if I could choose any voice I'd choose Chris Cornell or Morgan Freeman.
I know watermarks are never foolproof, but they may deter casual misuse.
So, from what I understand, I cannot use it and then upload the training video to Youtube. Or can I?
Interesting legal problem.
Would you be interested in any help porting/maintaining a Linux release?
Any idea how this is possible? Voicemod does something similar and I couldn't figure it out. Is it actually AI or is this just shifting pitch/reverb/etc
It's not even producing natural tones. None of the voices they're demoing sound real in any way. It's a toy, no more, no less.
Seriously?
Just improve the installer so I don’t feel like I’ve been scammed by malware!
- overcoming social anxiety in voice or online calls. It doesn’t take very many bullying incidents during childhood to become convinced you have a horrible or weird voice. I can see this being used as a useful tool to make people feel more comfortable by having a different voice
- amateur interactive fiction development. Having your characters have a real voice in a game in response too the players commands is a real need, and being able to record it yourself and be a different character would be a huge enabler of creating something for a solo developer.
- internal HR videos/podcasts. Creating these can be very expensive, needing different persons reading out dialogue could significantly reduce the effort in recording and producing these
- another instrument for music creators. Auto tune is a very common tool for music production for all skill levels, and this could be applied in a very similar way
It no doubt can be used for disingenuous purposes, any technology can. But these can be real life improving tools enabling many people to do things they never thought possible.
The idea of participating in Q&A session in a webinar would be far too confronting and inconceivable for many people, but to be able to do it semi-anonymously with a different voice would eliminate much of the anxiety preventing them
Of course this only works for your "online persona", but still the idea of impacting how you are perceived by working on your voice... is a thing.
Text-to-speech AI voice generators exist, but you don't have fine control over the emotion/expressiveness/intonation of the lines like you do with this approach.
Though by using an online service approach it means providing one's real voice to a service that may be using it for further training. Users have to make the call whether they feel they're good stewards.
If humanity can figure out how to make machines think, may we should also figure out how to stop doing evil to each other
On a personal level, I don't think one can do much against the zeitgeist. But they can decide what part they play in it.
I think it's rather sad. Yes, there are some fringe use-cases perhaps but I think this is the wrong direction for humanity. We should find more value in what we already have rather than inventing arbitrary things like this to hide away from real acceptance of ourselves.
Ironically, this will lead to a work where we need to use these fake personas online to not have our lives messed with offline.
I don’t fully agree with your first paragraph, but I do agree with the second one.
I can't really see it becoming common for cold-calls that pretend to be someone the victim knows (like the terrifying ransom calls), since the operations work at a huge scale expecting most people to not even pick up a "scam likely" call. Even given free and instant model tuning, just having to find voice clips of the person prior to each unanswered automated call seems like it would tank the quantity they're able to make.
I imagine there will be plenty of unevidenced claims that this is what scammers did to them though. Victims have always said "it sounded exactly like him/her", and from there it's more comforting for someone to conclude they must've been fooled by a sophisticated attack rather than something simple.
For more targetted phishing, like pretending to be a company's CEO and phoning employees to get access, I could definitely see it being used. I think we're probably going to have to move "person sounds like boss over the phone" from "plausible to fake" to "trivial to fake".
You can clone a voice from a clip which is under 5 seconds.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsofts-ai-program-can-clone-y...
All you need is a short spam call and you’re done before you even realise anything is happening. Or grab some video out of Facebook since you’ll have the family connections right there for the taking.