“Hey Siri, is that YOU or Aunt Becky?! 🤖🗣️👀 Meta’s Voicebox AI Tech Promises Familiar Voices!”
TL;DR;
Meta teases its new voice-based generative AI tech, Voicebox, with the potential to transform your digital assistant’s voice into someone you actually recognize. Imagine Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant speaking in the voice of your best friend or favorite celeb! 💁♀️🎉 Hold on, don’t get too excited – it’s only a ‘sneak peek’ at this point, with concerns over misuse and ethics putting a pause on public availability. 🚧🔒
Full Story:
In the ever-evolving world of artificial intelligence, Meta, formerly Facebook, is planning to give your everyday digital assistant a familiar makeover. Ever wanted your very own Morgan Freeman narrating your commute, or your grandmother reminding you to pick up milk? Well, folks, the future is looking bright…and surprisingly familiar! 🌞🎧
Voicebox, the promising new AI tech, can generate high-quality audio clips and can even pull a Houdini by editing out those annoying background noises from your audio – the car horns, the dog barking – while keeping the content and style of the audio intact. That’s some serious magic, amirite? 🎩🐇
This isn’t some one-language pony either! Voicebox is multilingual, flexing its linguistic muscles in not one, not two, but SIX different languages! 🌍💬 Talk about a cosmopolitan vibe!
The idea behind this innovation? To turn our digital assistants from monotonous robots into engaging personalities, or maybe even lend their voices to non-playable characters in the metaverse. Imagine bumping into a virtual friend with your real friend’s voice. It’s like Meta inception or something! 🔄🎮
But before we get all giddy with excitement, Meta’s got its parental hat on, worrying about potential misuse. No kidding! There are definitely more than a few voices I wouldn’t want my assistant mimicking. 😅🚫 Hence, it’s a no-go for public availability just yet. Meta’s determined to find that sweet spot between open communication with the AI community and keeping it responsible.
To give us a taste of the tech, the AI team at Meta has been kind enough to share some audio samples and a research paper, detailing their achievements thus far. In one video, an audio clip is run through Voicebox, generating the same phrase in six different voice styles. It even has the ability to take an audio clip of a person speaking and have their voice read a different phrase, a phrase they’ve never spoken in reality. Creepy or cool? You decide. 😲🔮
Imagine removing that annoying dog barking in the background of your Zoom call, or changing the wording in a recorded conversation. And if that isn’t enough to blow your mind, it can even take someone’s speech in a foreign language and have their voice say it in English. Now that’s some serious tech wizardry! 🧙♂️💻
It’s been a few months since CEO Mark Zuckerberg set the AI ball rolling, and this latest development is adding a whole new spin. But it does leave us with a bunch of questions. Will this turn into a full-blown privacy issue? Is it cool or downright creepy to have your digital assistant impersonate your favorite person? What if you don’t want your voice replicated? And who, or what, gets to decide that? 💭🚦
Remember, all of this is just speculative for now. Meta hasn’t released the Voicebox model or code
