Interesting Links for 10-01-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Speech synthesis is getting a lot better at copying human voices - still mostly sounds artificial though

(tags:speech voice ai microsoft )

2. Fine dining may not be possible in a world where workers are treated fairly (and the world's best restaurant is closing)

(tags:restaurant food work business inequality )

3. NI Protocol: UK and EU reach agreement on trade data sharing

(tags:UK Europe GoodNews NorthernIreland )

4. Major donors call on Rishi Sunak to reform political funding system

(tags:money politics UK reform corruption )

5. Federal agency considers ban on gas stoves following report linking them to childhood asthma

(tags:gas asthma USA )

6. Suffix 'ussy' is American Dialect Society's word of the year

(tags:LGBT words language sex vagina )

7. Looking at Edinburgh pedestrian deaths

(tags:edinburgh transport cars buses death safety roads viaDanielDWilliam )

8. What an octopus must think of a human (told in the style of lovecraftian horror)

(tags:hplovecraft octopus perception humans )

9. Almost 90% of games sold in UK in 2022 were digital

(tags:games internet business uk )

Comments

[andrewducker]

That's a really good point. And we can cope with very silly cartoon voices, but if they aren't done by an actual person then they just sound too wrong.

[simont]

It's tempting to say that the difficult part is conveying the right emphasis and emotions, rather than just pronouncing all the words intelligibly. A human actor voicing a cartoon character has to function as an actor, after all, not just someone reading out a script any old way.

But even there, the video side is much easier than the audio side, because cartoon artists have no difficulty producing line-art facial expressions from which we can interpret emotions.

[andrewducker]

I mean, if you equate "cartoonists" with "voice-over actors" then neither of them has any difficulty producing things from which we can interpret emotions :-)