Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
Close enough!
As you have probably noticed, today we are going to talk about text to speech, or TTS
in short.
TTS means that we write a piece of text, and a computer synthesized voice will read it
aloud for us.
This is really useful for reading the news, or creating audiobooks that don't have any
official voiceovers.
This work was done by researchers at Princeton University and Adobe and is about text-based
audio narration editing.
This one is going to be crazy good.
The Adobe guys like to call this the Photoshop of voiceovers.
In a normal situation, we have access to a waveform and if we wish to change anything
in a voiceover, we need to edit it.
Editing waveforms by hand is extremely difficult - traditional techniques often can't even
reliably find the boundaries between words or letters, let alone edit them.
And with this technique, we can cut, copy, and even edit this text and the waveforms
will automatically be transformed appropriately using the same voice.
We can even use new words that have never been uttered in the original narration.
It solves an optimization problem where the similarity, smoothness and the pace of the
original footage is to be matched as closely as possible.
One of the excellent new features is that we can even choose from several different
voicings for the new word and insert the one that we deem the most appropriate.
For expert users, the pitch and duration is also editable.
It is always important to have a look at a new technique and make sure that it works
well in practice, but in science, this is only the first step.
There has to be more proof that a new proposed method works well in a variety of cases.
In this case, a theoretical proof by means of mathematics is not feasible, therefore
a user study was carried out where listeners were shown synthesized and real audio samples
and had to blindly decide which was which.
The algorithm was remarkably successful at deceiving the test subjects.
Make sure to have a look at the paper in the description for more details.
This technique is traditional in a sense that it doesn't use any sort of neural networks,
however, there are great strides being made in that area as well, which I am quite excited
to show you in future episodes.
And due to some of these newer video and audio editing techniques, I expect that within the
internet forums, fake news is going to be an enduring topic.
I hope that in parallel with better and better text and video synthesis, there will be an
arms race with other methods that are designed to identify these cases.
A neural detective, if you will.
And now, if you excuse me, I'll give this publicly available TTS one more try and see
if I can retire from narrating videos.
Thanks for watching and for your generous support, and I'll see you next time.
Yep.
Exact same thing.
Bet you didn't even notice it.