Observed Signal · Jan 10, 2023 · Technical Release · Source: Trending Topics · Impact: 3/5 · Sentiment: Neutral
Microsoft's New AI Mimics Voices With Just 3 Seconds of Audio
Microsoft is developing a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can simulate a person's voice from a three-second audio sample. The model is built on Meta's EnCodec audio codec and trained on Meta's LibriLight audiobook library, which contains 60,000 hours of English speech from more than 7,000 speakers. VALL-E can preserve the speaker's emotional tone and acoustic environment, such as the sound of a telephone call. Microsoft suggests the model could be used for speech editing and creating audio content together with other AI models like GPT-3. Because the technology carries risks of voice spoofing and fraud, Microsoft does not plan to release the code for experimentation. The company also notes that a detection model could be built to identify audio clips generated by VALL-E.
Microsoft's voice-cloning AI could enable new synthetic audio and content creation use cases, but it is an early-stage research model with no direct AdTech application yet.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Microsoft developed VALL-E, a text-to-speech AI that can simulate a voice using a three-second audio sample.
- VALL-E is built on Meta's EnCodec audio codec.
- Training used Meta's LibriLight library with 60,000 hours of English speech from more than 7,000 speakers.
- VALL-E preserves the emotional tone and acoustic environment of the audio sample.
- Microsoft will not release VALL-E code due to risks of voice spoofing and misuse.
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Ontology Mapping & Concepts
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