Awesome Voice

Comedian and beatboxer Afonso Rodrigues has a impressive and uncanny talent. He’s able to make it sound like his voice is creating an echo. He doesn’t just have one echo sound either – he can create doppler effects and can pull off echoes in both English and Portuguese. His echo mountain trick is crazy.

OpenAI’s new ChatGPT language model GPT-4o can respond to and with text, audio, images, and video. But perhaps more scarily amazing is that in Voice Mode – which allows it to respond using an AI-generated voice – it’s as snappy and natural-sounding as a human. GPT-4o is available even to free users, but using it in Voice Mode is limited to paid subscribers.

Driving a car typically requires a mix of motor skills to steer the wheel and push the pedals. Engineer James Bruton wanted to see if he could make a vehicle that was controlled by voice. The Deepgram speech recognition API and James’ electronic circuits are fairly responsive, but the lag is enough to make for a harrowing ride.

This little gadget from Amazon fills in a gap in your living room or home theater system. It works in concert with your Fire TV or Echo to enable voice remote control for your infrared-enabled entertainment equipment like TVs, satellite boxes, and audio receivers. Device compatibility explained here. Available 12/11/19.

Bloomberg journalist Ashlee Vance sat down with the founders of Lyrebird, a startup developing artificial intelligence tech that can learn the sound of any human voice, then make it say anything. Amazing, yet creepy stuff. Try an early version here.

We’re so used to hearing computers sound like Siri and Alexa, but the earliest days of synthesized vocals dates back all the way to 1939, and Homer Dudley’s invention, which combined buzzes and hisses with varying intonations to produce humanoid voices.

Gilles Azzaro used a desktop 3D printer to make this voice print of a portion of President Obama’s 2013 inauguration speech about a new industrial revolution. Regardless of the audio, the sculpture looking like a cool alien landscape.