Of course there are legitimate uses, which means everyone should have completely unfettered access and nobody selling it should be responsible for irresponsible users. Personally, I’m sick of the government limiting my artistic freedom because the mediums I use might be misused by a tiny group of bad actors. For example, it’s unnecessarily difficult to source pineapple grenades for my large scale abstract punched tin crafts. The other people who live in my apartment building haven’t complained when I asked if they had a problem with it, so what’s the problem? And when I can get ahold of it, white phosphorous makes a great addition to my annual deep-woods pyrotechnic light shows. I just don’t understand this nanny state garbage.

It does have actual genuine uses. I'm in the process of recording a series of tutorials for my peers but I'd like them to hear things in my voice so it doesn't sound like I have offloaded the work to someone else.

I don't know if this helps or harms the credibility but I can't really talk more than an hour without seriously straining my voice. So cloning it sounds like a great use-case for someone with a similar problem.

Looking forward to trying this.

When my IoT geiger counter starts going off, I do what the in-home PA system's voice to be Admiral Adama warning my family of an imminent radiological threat, and preparing the Vipers for launch.

Edward James Olmos if you're reading this, I'm willing to pay a license fee, but then I expect actual recordings and not just AI bullshit. I'm not pirating your voice, you're refusing to let me hire it.

proudly trumpeting the ability to co-opt other people's identities without their permission

EXACTLY. Clone the wrong person's voice and it's game over.

It's useful for some things, like satire. Presidents Play is a good series in YouTube where it uses US presidents' cloned voices for comedic satire.

Randy Travis also used AI on his last album after losing his voice.

> Windows Defender may give a warning about untrusted application and disallow further execution of Voice-Pro. If SmartScreen security level is set to "Warn", just click "More info" and then click "Run anyway". If SmartScreen is set to level "Block" there will be no button to run the installation. In this case, open the properties of the start.bat file, and check "Unblock", apply the change and run the start.bat again.

https://github.com/abus-aikorea/voice-pro?tab=readme-ov-file...

clear as day, do not trust this code

Exactly, and this isn't adding anything significant from what I can see that isn't already achieved in much more clear and openly presented repositories. Take coqui for example. Cloning as as easy as recording an example of your voice and using

  ```python
  from TTS.api import TTS
  tts = TTS("tts_models/multilingual/multi-dataset/xtts_v2", gpu=True)
  
  # generate speech by cloning a voice using default settings
  tts.tts_to_file(text="It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it I'm not going to be silent.",
                  file_path="output.wav",
                  speaker_wav="/path/to/target/  speaker.wav",
                  language="en")
  ```

Perhaps I'm paranoid but this has multiple red flags that make hesitate to install - even the "too good to be true" aspect of such comprehensive features makes me wonder (which is probably irrational and taking it a bit too far!)

I have resorted to using separate physical computers + vlan network separation when exploring untrusted AI workloads. Yes, it costs, but so does a breach.

Thanks for raising this aspect.

Btw https://github.com/haimgel/display-switch helps a lot.

Try recording the installation process with a camera. The entire installation process is displayed in the Windows command. It's just installing Python packages and downloading the AI model and audio files. That's all.

I'd be interested as well. This is where I imagine the space is going - particularly as the potential for litigation increases around cloning.

Game studios will spin up a bunch of unique virtual voices for all the dialogue of extras. It'll probably be longer before we see replacements of main characters though. There's been some research in speech-to-speech transference as well - this means that company employee A records the character B's line with the appropriate emotional nuance (angry, sad, etc.) and the emotional aspect is copied on top of the generated TTS.

Have you tried eleven labs? I used that. Had to record 3 hours of training audio reading books and and news articles. But the result was really good.

I’ve used tortoise tts before and trained it on my voice and a mix of voices. It’s not perfect but still impressive.

StyleTTSv2 is pretty good and open source, you can easily traverse its latent space for voice

Similarly, I’m not excited by “voice cloning” at all, but I’d like to have very high quality, natural sounding TTS. All of the projects that do that seem to be geared towards also allowing arbitrary voice cloning based on short audio clips I’ve noticed.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California, he refused clemency for notorious gang founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams, who was sentenced to death for four murders in 1979.

https://www.ocregister.com/2005/12/12/governors-full-stateme...

Reading over the governor's statement explaining his reasons for denial of clemency, my brain couldn't help but do so in an Arnold voice. Sometimes, to amuse friends, I would read portions of it aloud while doing the voice.

Maybe it's a bit tasteless, like the anime-girl Demon Core memes, but there's just something about hearing the legal and administrative justification for proceeding with an execution in the voice of the Terminator.

I'm the same way with famous YouTubers. If I see "Guru Larry" Bundy Jr. or Clint "LGR" Basinger leave a comment on someone else's video, my brain reads it in their voice.

I needed until "Everybody’s talking about it" to hear it in his voice :)

Please no spoilers!

Voices can be beautiful.

Doesn't that basically apply to all binary executables? Anything new and unrecognised by the scanner.

It's really easy for a technical person to do as well.

I use Coqui TTS[0] as part of my home automation, I wrote a small python script that lets me upload a voice clip for it to clone after I got the idea from HeyWillow[1], and a small shim that lets me send the output to a Home Assistant media player instead of using their standard output device. I run the TTS container on a VM with a Tesla P4 (~£100 to buy) and get about 1x-2x (roughly the same time it'd take to say it, to process) using the large model.

Just for a giggle, I uploaded a few 3s-5s second clip of myself speaking and cloned my voice, then executed a command to our living room media player to call my wife into the room; from another room, she was 100% convinced it was myself speaking words I'd never spoken.

I tried playing with a variety of sentences for a few hours and overall, it sounded almost exactly like me, to me, with the exception of some "attitude" and "intonation" I know I wouldn't use in my speech. I didn't notice much of an improvement using much longer clips; the short ones were "good enough".

Tangentially, it really bugs me that most phone providers in the UK insist you record a "personal greeting" now before they'll let you check your voice mail box, I just record silence, because the last thing I want/need is a voicemail greeting in my voice confirming to some randomer I didn't want calling me, who I am and that my number is active, even more so knowing how I can clone any voice to a reasonably good accuracy with just a few seconds of audio.

[0] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS [1] https://heywillow.io/

The best thing about crypto is that it is an ever growing bug bounty program for all aspects of authentication :)

Technically, wouldn't a simple "Hold on, I'll call you back" test call stop that?

Not to mention a directory full of binaries which could do who knows what. The author is asking people turn off their antivirus, execute their code as admin, and be fine with it running binary files doing whatever

https://github.com/abus-aikorea/voice-pro/tree/main/app

Yeah I also noticed the install instructions is run this batch file that gets administrator access and starts downloading things…

It’s wrappers all the way down

Yeah they made an easy to use frontend. Don't be the dropbox guy

I'm absolutely using celebrity voices for my Home Assistant voice. Amazon has spent the last couple years removing the voices for Alexa that people had paid for.

To be fair, they’ve got pretty serious potential for letting tech companies get paid for a seasoned voice actor’s unique delivery, tone, inflection, etc rather than the voice actor themselves.

It’s weird to me that people look at a technology and then assume from their reckoning that they know all the uses for that technology immediately. Most technological progress happens because someone notices a creative use for something that already exists which nobody else has noticed.

I like tools like these cause they make zero trust default even more obvious, and their "pretty limited use" is saving people hours of work.

They are pretty good for leaving messages for my blind friend. I generally find calling / voice texts a waste of time (I type and read far faster than I talk or listen, not to mention the ability to reread etc), but my blind friend prefers getting voice messages when on his phone and this works for us. I type and send and when he comes back with something, Whisper makes it into text for me.

Gen AI space to everyone else: “Your computer scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they should, they didn’t stop to think if they could just do it anyway”

How many victims will it take for lawmakers to do something about this?

Bulldozing grandma is just the cost of technological progress /s

Quit being a doomer or keep it to yourself. This reminds me of the sound boards that were popular in the early 2000s except way more versatile. Some things are just good for people to have fun and THAT'S OKAY.

It’s a bit of a hassle, but after closing the Windows command, you can restart the program and use it indefinitely. The results you worked on will still remain in the workspace folder.

Yeah, felt like it positions itself as open source project here and on GitHub, but buries the cost in other pages... Doesn't even say the subscription cost anywhere I could find (in English). Not a huge fan of this advertising model.

I haven’t looked at the code, but can you just patch out the 30 minute limit?

Do you mean Inflection's Pi?

I'd claim the way most people imagine it being used for scamming, cold-calls impersonating someone the victim knows, doesn't really end up working out in practice because scam operations dial numbers at a huge scale expecting most not to pick up a "scam likely" call (or be away, or a dead number, etc.). Having to find a voice clip prior to each unanswered call would tank the quantity they're able to make.

For spear-phishing (impersonate CEO, tell assistant to transfer money) it's more feasible, but I hope it forces acceptance that "somebody sounds like X over the phone" is not and has never been a good verification method - people have been falling for scams like those fake ransom calls[0] for decades.

Not that there aren't potential harms, but I think they're outweighed by positive applications. Those uncomfortable with their natural voice, such as transgender people, can communicate closer to how they wish to be perceived - or someone whose voice has been impaired (whether just a temporary cold or a permanent disorder/illness/accident) can use it from previous recordings. Privacy benefits from being able to communicate online or record videos without revealing your real voice, which I think is why many (myself included) currently resort to text-only. There's huge potential in the translation and vocal isolation aspects aiding communication - feels to me as though we're heading towards creating our own babelfish. There's also a bunch of creative applications - doing character voices for a D&D session or audiobook, memes/satire, and likely new forms of interactive media (customised movies, audio dramas where the listener plays a role, videogame NPCs that react with more than just prereccorded lines, etc.)

[0]: https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/virtual-kidnapping

You do realise this is not the first AI release to clone voices?

[flagged]

My experience with voice cloning is that training is typically not required for it to work. You just embed a bit of audio of the desired voice to be cloned using the backing VAE and the model can do the rest.

Is it not the same with this project?

The syncing of the original English is way off. I don't really know how they got that to be so broken.

"If, by whiskey...."

There is nothing in here that precludes you from running this on any OS that supports python + CUDA. They use miniconda for installation of python and python packages, but this could just as easily be a venv + system CUDA install or even better: a container. This is only one tiny Dockerfile away from running anywhere.

You don't want an Instagram hack app. You want to go home and rethink your life.