I, for One, Accept Our New Robot Overlords · 2:25am Mar 16th, 2020
I'm sure you have all heard about the madlads that made AI learn how to speak in the voices of ponies. If you haven't, here is the website:
15ai
You may notice something. A 140 character limit. Even if website traffic logistics didn't limit how much we could upload, I would say this is about right for transcribing fic into character voice acting. A lot of tweaking of phonetic spelling was necessary to make some passages understandable, and even more to get the tone in the ballpark of what I wanted. There were a handful of times in which I had to break up sentences and remove punctuation, because the AI would get confused and slur and babble incomprehensibly due to some combination of stimuli.
In the end, I had 141 .wav files. Fortunately, Audacity has tools to combine them fairly quickly. Go to the tracks tab, Align Tracks, Align End to End. Then go to the Tracks tab, Mix, Render and Mix to New Track. I found the voice clips were a bit fast, so I slowed the tempo from 600 bpm to 680 bpm.
tl:dr - I got an AI to voice https://www.fimfiction.net/story/444558/anything-for-a-friend
You can find it from My Totally Innocent Soundcloud
There's something delightful in making Twilight say "There's no way this technology can possibly end well." Especially when it sounds like she's discussing a season-end villain.
God, I love Soundcloud.
The community has always been impressive, even in the beginning.
But this?
This takes it yet another step forward.
Nicely done, both you and the insane sparks that are working this project.
It's a completely new level of insanity!!!
Now I want to test this tool myself.
P.S.: I'll definitely listen to your story.
It's extremely amusing that this is a thing that's happened now. The lack of realism in the way that words emphasized when read out makes it impossible to take seriously, but I can't help but imagine the value that something like this could have when applied to a Sweetie-bot story.