Microsoft’s new text-to-speech model can duplicate anyone's voice in 3 seconds

Re:Microsoft’s new text-to-speech model can duplicate anyone... by Mordisquitos on Monday January 09, 2023 @08:44AM (#34310200)

Interestingly, the prime example of how much a person's attachment to their voice is part of their own personal identity also comes from ALS... but ironically in the opposite direction. I'm talking of course about Stephen Hawking, who famously rejected upgrading his voice synthesiser when technology improved [0]:

    Hawking is very attached to his voice: in 1988, when Speech Plus gave him the new synthesizer, the voice was different so he asked them to replace it with the original. His voice had been created in the early '80s by MIT engineer Dennis Klatt, a pioneer of text-to-speech algorithms. He invented the DECtalk, one of the first devices to translate text into speech. He initially made three voices, from recordings of his wife, daughter and himself. The female's voice was called "Beautiful Betty", the child's "Kit the Kid", and the male voice, based on his own, "Perfect Paul." "Perfect Paul" is Hawking's voice.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-voi...

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Re:Microsoft’s new text-to-speech model can duplicate anyone... by IanCal on Monday January 09, 2023 @10:07AM (#34311118)

I disagree that's in the opposite direction. Hawking didn't want to change his voice - he'd had this for years at that point, and the option was also to just change to a different arbitrary voice rather than restoring what he had before.

Something like this could let someone keep their "original" voice. Hawking may have preferred to have something that sounded like his voice before he lost it than a completely new voice.

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