[neilk]

What are the anticipated use cases?

I know of one: transgender people often would like to alter the timbre of their voice and spend a lot of time training their voice. At least for online scenarios, this can just do it.

But other than that AI voice altering research seems like it benefits mostly scammers? I’m just wondering what they tell themselves they’re doing. I didn’t see this in the paper.

[swatcoder]

I think it's hard to see the use case right now because the quality remains pretty dreadful.

But the prototypical legitimate use case (which we needn't be excited about), is a voice over artist leasing their timbre instead of their time so that new text can be made to sound like them without their being actively involved. If it were to become mature (which doesn't seem close, from this example), it would be a big step up from existing phone tree voice assemblage and would open the doors for dubbing, animation voiceover, harmonization, and ADR in commercial sound and film.

Gender masking or general anonymization aren't really served by this, as you don't need to adopt a specific target timbre to deliver on those. There are other techniques that work perfectly well for those uses, some that have already been around for ages.

[pgt]

From the abstract: "making it applicable to real-time communication scenarios like calls and video conferencing, and addressing use cases such as voice anonymization in these scenarios."

[thinkski]

I suspect one is masking that a call center is in a low wage country, e.g. make customer in U.S. believe they’re talking to someone in U.S. while paying a fraction of the U.S. wage.

[neilk]

Right. I thought of that too, but it doesn’t mask accents, at least not yet

I suppose if you could make agents all sound the same they would be interchangeable, and companies always love that. It’s Anjali or Ligaya or Dolores but now they all sound like “Becky”?

[Dracophoenix]

Voiceover/broadcasting. Recording or acquiring any audio that isn't freely licensed background music is among the most expensive and time consuming parts of a prerecorded broadcast. With voice alteration, a director and sound engineer can become their own actors in anything ranging from commercial spots to large-scale and long-running animated shows.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I suspect that fraudsters will love this tool.

I really believe that we are entering a "golden age" of fraud. It will be crazy.

[viila]

The first case you mention are scammers too really. They're trying to deceive others into believing they're something they're not, especially with this sort of voice manipulation.

[numpad0]

so there are regions and societies where the former of those use cases is massively more common than the latter, and then there are also...

[webappguy]

RFK Jr.

[neilk]

You’re getting downvoted perhaps because people think you’re saying something political, but I think you mean “a stronger voice for people with physical issues producing speech”.

I have a friend who has a faint, scratchy voice because his throat is riddled with benign growths that a surgeon has to dig out of him every few years. Eventually he will probably lose his voice. Maybe?