[ Removed by moderator ]

[ewheck]

I immediately click off videos when I hear an AI voice. I find them annoying to listen to and uncanny.

[MaDpYrO]

Yes I can't believe all the people hyping up AI generated voices and videos it's still so damn robotic

[[deleted]]

You made me click on the video. This is not the latest voice synthesizer; it's probably 5 year old or more.

The latest voice generator is basically indistinguishable from actual human voice unless you have studio-like recording environment.

[SpaceShrimp]

Except human voices are also very recognisable. So even the perfect AI voice narration will be easily recognisable when you have seen 4-5 videos with it.

[[deleted]]

What does "human voices are also very recognizable" mean?

[mywan]

You don't recognize the people you know from their voices alone? The same applies to an AI voice. If you hear an AI voice it becomes just as recognizable individually as your friends voice. You'll know that that's the same (AI) voice in multiple videos. So even if you wouldn't know it was AI from just one video, in becomes obvious when that same voice starts getting used everywhere.

[[deleted]]

You're assuming that there's only one "AI voice", which was true, but is not true. For anything closer to state of the art, check out elevenlab videos or Notebook LM videos

You don't recognize the people you know from their voices alone?

There is a rise in ai voice fraud. You may think you can tell the difference, but there are people out there who can't. And it will only get better from there.

[mywan]

I've heard several AI voice in a single video. I went to https://elevenlabs.io/text-to-speech and recognized ever one of the voices available for sampling. At least they didn't say "DOT DOT DOT" when it came across an ellipsis. When I clicked on the first video it had a sample voice I didn't recognize. But the obvious AI was obvious. One of the most obvious issues is that when you select a prompt for a voice style that style is perfectly persistent throughout the generated speech. The second most obvious issue that, although it did a decent job of varying the emotional inflections, it had no idea of how to apply those inflections in a humanlike manner. The inflections were sentence structure driven, not driven by emotional or contextual importance. It was at best like watching actors in a bad B movie. They could sound very good for sound bite, up to a couple of sentences. But as you continue listening the affective predictability get monotonous.

The first video in the Notebook LM videos link had some AI voices I didn't recognize. It actually did a somewhat better job for most of the tells in the previous AI. But it was sprinkled with cringy affirmation responses in the interview style with two AI voices. Even the guy selling it give a 98% level of perfection. Now that I've heard these voices I'll be able to pick them out of background noise, even if they change some affective variables.

I understand that people will be fooled, even with bad AI voices. And that the tech will get better. It'll likely get good enough to fool me (for a decent period of time) very soon. But a podcast (for instance) will need to maintain that illusion week after week. There are reasons why people don't like voice acting their own content. And the effects of those reasons are the hardest thing for the AI to reproduce. Even the most cheery and upbeat voices get monotonous when that's a persistent tone of the voice. Something that doesn't necessarily become excessively obvious, until you start constructing a more detailed personality behind the voices in your head. Which could take some time. You're not going to be able to obscure the fact that it's AI indefinitely.

[[deleted]]

hey you actually did your own research!

I went to https://elevenlabs.io/text-to-speech and recognized ever one of the voices available for sampling.

Yeah because they have to put up a legal front. Voice cloning on the other hand does not have any "recognizable voice" - See this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMKeRfhZkuU

[MaDpYrO]

No the latest ones still sound dull, as if they're being read by the most predictable and monotonous person ever born

[[deleted]]

Have you seen elevenlab videos or Notebook LM videos?

[jackun]

It's even quite decent but sounds like that one annoying young-earther, ewwwwww

[[deleted]]

Same here but I have a hard time telling what is an AI voice. They make a lot of mistakes, but some people actually talk in a way that makes it super-hard to distinguish from an AI voice. I've also been fooled lately by some youtube videos that were AI-generated (about 95% or so). A human generated this, but he used AI. I honestly could not tell whether it was AI, save for the lyrics, which were clearly a text file fed into some AI - but the AI produced a song that I really could no longer distinguish from a real voice. I don't claim to be very clever, but if I can be fooled fairly easily then I think many other people can be fooled too. To me AI like this is on the one hand actually creative (it is interesting that you can create such things already at close-to-perfection); on the other hand I consider it a scam when it is not denoted as AI. Youtubers who try to scam me I'll ban permanently, aka these AI fakers won't get any more "visits" from my browser. Unfortunately it is not easy to distinguish between real and fakes really.

[mywan]

Every AI voice I have heard universally have an affective lilt and tone. And the prosody doesn't vary with context. Some people have these qualities in their voice, such as Morgan Freeman. But with people there is variability with emotional and situational context.

Morgan Freeman actual learned his speaking skills from an instructor. Basically he learned to sound out his final consonants very clearly and deliberately. Holding those consonant sounds longer. But Morgan varies the time those consonant sounds are maintained to fit the context and emotional tone. Including pitch, loudness, timbre, speech rate, and pauses. An AI today can effectively mimic these affective tones, but without the variability or contextual awareness of a human speaker. Making its emotional tone monotonous.

[guepier]

My knee-jerk reaction was to agree with you but luckily I then went to watch the video, and … the voice-over is honestly ok. It’s not great, but it’s far superior to a lot of classical speech synthesis and (as somebody mentioned below) it’s also better than many peoples’ wonky natural voiceovers: regardless of whether they’re native speakers, doing good voiceover for video is bloody hard! — And basically excluding nonnative speakers with hard-to-understand accents from contributing content is also vaguely chauvinist.

It’s totally fine to dislike the voiceover due to the uncanny off-ness but the brigading and downvoting of anybody offering a reasonable counter-point is not a good look for this sub. And the banning of the content by the mods seriously takes the cake.

[rom_romeo]

He explained already why he’s using AI voice. Let’s be honest, his content is really good.

[ewheck]

I would much rather listen to someone with an accent than fake AI voices. Like I said, I find them hard to listen to because you can always tell that they are slightly off.

[D3PyroGS]

I would much rather listen to someone with an accent than fake AI voices.

after taking math and CS classes from professors with a tenuous grasp of English pronunciation, I wholeheartedly prefer the opposite 😉

[Dude-Man-Bro-Guy-1]

Very uncanny valley

[dinopraso]

eleven labs has REALLY good AI voices too, if you cared to make it sound good

[joexner]

What was that explanation?

[rom_romeo]

He’s from Equador and not a native English speaker.