Here's one example of a situation where I could very easily see someone regretting not spending more time at work.
As a professional creative, I'm betting there are a fair number of authors, film directors, screenwriters and so on who died regretting they didn't finish their latest work, or didn't spend more time on the thing they really wanted to make. That's work.
I know we can create vaguely convincing synthesised voices, but I've not run across a program which can take my recorded voice, and convert it to a celebrity, or even shift apparent pitch or gender convincingly.
I was about to say that those clips still registered as a computer quite easily to me, until I got to the comparison with a human voice.
I think I've just gotten so used to that voice as the "google" voice that I automatically associate it with computers. It would be strange to meet the human that was providing the human voice in those samples.
"Deep Voice 2 can learn from hundreds of voices and imitate them perfectly. Unlike traditional systems, which need dozens of hours of audio from a single speaker, Deep Voice 2 can learn from hundreds of unique voices from less than half an hour of data per speaker, while achieving high audio quality." - http://research.baidu.com/deep-voice-2-multi-speaker-neural-...
Now imagine that with Tacotron quality, and you'll get that "strange" effect with anyone, meeting their vocal clone.
This is still text-to-speech, so it's not live-copying your intonation, but you could easily imagine a seq2seq network designed to do so.
I had a very strange experience like that recently when listening to Radio 3, the BBC's mostly-classical channel. They had an opera programme with guest presenters from the Met Opera in New York. The usual BBC presenters of course have British accents, and one of these American presenters had a particular accent that my brain latched onto as matching the sound of synthetic speech. I just could not suspend disbelief and convince myself that this speech - which rationally of course I knew was human - was that of a real person rather than some sort of AI assistant. It was a very strange feeling.
I did have a fever at the time, which might not have helped.
It's intent and emotion that I'm really interested in - which to the best of my knowledge, computer generation still isn't good at. (This is for VR games, so high quality voice acting is a priority)
Hence, if I could find a program which could reliably turn one actor's voice into another, I could use their acting ability, but with more characters and less requirement for them to "put on" voices. That's powerful because really good actors are thin on the ground, and also because trying to hold a different voice or accent can limit the quality of the main performance.
I suspect I'm one of the few readers here (@cstross being another) for whom this is genuinely important professional information. And it's fantastic.
Sadly no mention of license there, though - kinda vital if one is intending to use some of the imagery in remix works - although given the texts are thoroughly out of copyright I'd assume that's not too big an issue.
This is probably correct. Scans of public domain works which are "slavish copies" containing "no spark of originality" were ruled public domain in Bridgeman Art Library vs Corel.
IANAL, but yeah: shouldn't these works not be under copyright, just on the basis of their age? Wouldn't the "phone book" doctrine apply here, also? There's no creative authorship in a collection of previous works.
It's also extremely good for RPGs and MMOs, neither of which are unpopular genres.
We haven't seen a lot of either yet, because both require considerable investment, but the first VR MMO, Orbus, is going very well, and Skyrim VR on PSVR is one of the first VR apps to really sell headsets.
(My own VR RPG also did very well, and convinced me it's a great use of the medium.)
This approximately describes my approach to game development, too. It works exceptionally well there as gamedev is all about crafting a fantasy and an experience.
It's held at mid-80s positive reviews after that, and numerous people have said it's the scariest thing they've ever experienced in VR. A good start to what I hope will be a long career making VR games.
Like @ndh2 has stated, train yourself to not do it. Otherwise, your spoken audio files will be fine, but your conversations in team meetings over webex or conference calls will still have it, and it would be annoying everyone else (if it's a lot) and you wouldn't know about it because no-one is going to tell you.
Also, if you start to edit the ums out, you will quickly get tired of wasting time on doing this, and would train yourself to not do it yourself. I went through this exercise after recording youtube screencasts that are 5 to 10 mins long, and wasting about 30 minutes editing out my ums and ahems.
This is good advice, but one question: why is the default assumption here that I'm the only person I ever record?
I'm pretty good at not um-ing too frequently (20 years of public speaking will do that), but I can't exactly require all my guests for podcasts or interviews, for example, first rigorously train themselves for months!
> why is the default assumption here that I'm the only person I ever record?
Because your question was in response to OPs statement regarding screenrecording, and in that, OP is talking about video and audio for recordings he/she does, not of group meetings.
> Whenever I need to document a particularly complex task or procedure, I record a 10 mins screencast and explain the process + show the steps
Total digression, but I participate in Toastmasters and there is a role in every meeting known as the 'Ah-Counter'. Every time someone uses a filler like um, ah, er, like, and, etc. they ring the bell to bring it to the speaker's attention. It supports individuals in being mindful about what they're saying and the fillers they are using.
There's something funny about contrasting this idea and yours but I'm having trouble putting it into words. Something about technology rendering solid communication skills obsolete in a subset of cases
Train yourself not to do it. It's not that hard, and it will go a long way in improving your communication.
Record 30 seconds without ums. If you failed, do it again. Then increase the time. Stop if you fail to much/can't concentrate, try again tomorrow. Recording yourself is the perfect opportunity to train.
Citation needed.
Here's one example of a situation where I could very easily see someone regretting not spending more time at work.
As a professional creative, I'm betting there are a fair number of authors, film directors, screenwriters and so on who died regretting they didn't finish their latest work, or didn't spend more time on the thing they really wanted to make. That's work.