Text-based Editing of Audio Narration | Two Minute Papers #167

dear fellow scholars this is two minute papers with károly FA hair Jean is ahead close enough as you have probably noticed today we are going to talk about text to speech or TTS in short TTS means that we write a piece of text and the computer synthesized voice will read it aloud for us this is really useful for reading the news or creating audio books that don't have any official voiceovers this work was done by researchers at Princeton University and Adobe and is about text-based audio narration editing this one is going to be crazy good the Adobe guys like to call this the Photoshop of voiceovers in a normal situation we have access to a waveform and if you wish to change anything in a voiceover we need to edit it editing waveforms by hand is extremely difficult traditional techniques often can't even reliably find the boundaries between words and letters let alone edit them and with this technique we can cut copy and even edit this text and the waveforms will automatically be transformed appropriately using the same voice had it struck squarely it would have killed him saved him we can even use new words that have never been uttered in the original narration we leave the eventualities to time and law em believe belief the we leave the eventualities to time and belief sauce an optimization problem where the similarity smoothness and the pace of the original footage is to be matched as closely as possible one of the excellent new features is that we can even choose from several different voicings for the new word and insert the one that we deem the most appropriate for expert users the page and duration is also editable it is always important to have a look at a new technique and make sure that it works well in practice but in science this is only the first step there has to be more proof that a new proposed method works well in a variety of cases in this case a theoretical proof by means of mathematics is not feasible therefore a user study was carried out where listeners were shown synthesized and real audio samples and had to blindly decide which was which the algorithm was remarkably successful at deceiving the test subjects make sure to have a look at the paper in the description for more details this technique is traditional in a sense that it doesn't use any sort of neural networks however there are great strides being made in that area as well which I am quite excited to show you in future episodes and due to some of these newer video and audio editing techniques I expect that within the internet forums safe news is going to be an enduring topic I hope that in parallel with better and better text and video synthesis there will be an arms race with other methods that are designed to identify these cases a neural detective if you will and now if you excuse me I'll give this publicly available TPS one more try and see if I can retire from narrating videos thanks for watching and for your generous support and I'll see you next time yep exact same thing that you didn't even notice it Oh you you