We are the co-founders of Lyrebird (https://lyrebird.ai/) and PhD students in AI at University of Montreal. We are building speech synthesis technologies to improve the way we communicate with computers. Right now, our key innovation is that we can copy the voice of someone else and make it say anything. The tech is still at its early stage but we believe that it is eventually going to make possible a wide range of new applications such as:
- reading loud text messages with the voice of the sender,
- reading audiobooks with the voice of your choice,
- giving a personalized digital voice to people who lost their voice due to a disease,
- allowing video game makers to have more customized dialogs generated on the fly, or avatars of their players,
- allowing movie makers to freeze the voice of their actors so that they can still use it if the actor ages or dies.
Yesterday we launched a beta version of our voice-cloning software: anyone can record one minute of audio and get a digital voice that sounds like them.
We know that many on HN are concerned about potential misuses surrounding these technologies and we share your concern. We write further on our ethical stance on this page: https://lyrebird.ai/ethics/.
Our blogpost about the launch: https://lyrebird.ai/blog/create-your-voice-avatar that features the first video combining generated audio and generated elements of the video.
There was a thread about us on HN when we launched our website four months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182262) but at that time, no one could test our software yet and we did not really answer any question of the community. So this time we are ready for questions and would love some feedback!