Category: gadgets

These Lyrebird people haven’t yet reached Adobe VoCo levels of voice fakery, but they’re getting there. And though their aim is to sell their technology to companies whose products include speech synthesis, once it’s widely available, the implications are quite similar.

What you’re listening to is a Lyrebird generated Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton talking about the company. Right now they sound quite low quality and computer generated, but with the arguable exception of Hillary it isn’t hard to figure out which voices those are. And though it may be tempting to write that sample off as digitized garbage and move on, it’s worth keeping in mind that those voices are as close to the genuine article as they are after the use of voice samples under a minute long as opposed to the 20 minutes required by VoCo.

This is all made by possible through the use of artificial neural networks, which function in a manner similar to the biological neural networks in the human brain. Essentially, the algorithm learns to recognize patterns in a particular person’s speech, and then reproduce those patterns during simulated speech.

“We train our models on a huge dataset with thousands of speakers,” Jose Sotelo, a team member at Lyrebird and a speech synthesis expert, told Gizmodo. “Then, for a new speaker we compress their information in a small key that contains their voice DNA. We use this key to say new sentences.”
The end result is far from perfect—the samples still exhibit digital artifacts, clarity problems, and other weirdness—but there’s little doubt who is being imitated by the speech generator. Changes in intonation are also discernible. Unlike other systems, Lyrebird’s solution requires less data per speaker to produce a new voice, and it works in real time. The company plans to offer its tool to companies in need of speech synthesis solutions.
“We are currently raising funds and growing our engineering team,” said Sotelo. “We are working on improving the quality of the audio to make it less robotic, and we hope to start beta testing soon.”

In 2014, I wrote all about how big of a deal the Window-Eyes and Microsoft Office partnership was going to be. It would change the game, I said. Freedom Scientific would need to re-evaluate the way it does business. It was time to celebrate or at least be very optimistic about a huge increase in the availability of affordable access software for the blind.

Well, today I stand before you a humble man. A humble man who can admit when he’s wrong. Because boy oh boy, did I ever miss the fuckin’ mark on that one.

In the years since the big announcement, a few things have happened. GW Micro, the makers of Window-Eyes, was purchased by ZoomText maker AI Squared, which for those who don’t know is basically the JAWS of low vision screen magnification. Skip ahead to 2016 and AI Squared is bought up by VFO, a firm that I believe is determined to own every blind thing on earth. I say this because it also owns Freedom Scientific, which for those who don’t know is the JAWS of JAWS.

All of that being the case, something had to give. It always does when smaller companies become bigger companies. And what gave in this case was the free screenreader with Office offer, because how are we supposed to make great gobs of money just giving shit away, amiright? If you think that last sentence is me being too harsh, then observe the hearty fuck you given by VFO to its valued Window-Eyes and Office customers in the announcement below. Basically, everybody gets free or at least discounted JAWS…except you, ya freeloaders. You get to contact a dealer and pay full price, which in another example of my crystal ball being a piece of shit is still friggin exorbitant.

If you would still like or still need a very good and constantly improving screenreader that is free of charge, now is a good time to give NVDA a try. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough that I’ve been using it almost exclusively for better than four years and regularly donate to keep it going even though there’s no requirement to do so. It, I feel confident saying without any fear of being mistaken, really has been and continues to be a game changer.

Ai Squared – Window-Eyes – JAWS Migration
Thank you for being a valued member of the GW Micro and Window-Eyes family. We regret to announce that sales of Window-Eyes have ended in the United States and Canada. Users outside of the United States and Canada should contact their local distributor for options. We are committed to our customers and will honor existing product purchases and software maintenance agreements, and we will continue to provide technical support to end users that have purchased Window-Eyes or a support package.  All users who are currently using Window-Eyes can continue to use the software indefinitely; however, as the Windows® operating system and/or applications change over time, Window-Eyes may not function adequately for your needs.
We understand how important a screen reader is to you and are offering JAWS® for Windows 18 as a replacement.  We are committed to providing a smooth transition and will honor existing Window-Eyes product purchases and software maintenance agreements, as follows.

• End users that paid for and are current with Window-Eyes 9.x will be converted to JAWS 18 at no charge.
• If you are using an earlier version of Window-Eyes, you can purchase an upgrade to JAWS 18.
• If you are using the free version of Window-Eyes you can continue to use it. While there is not an upgrade path from the free version, if you are interested in purchasing JAWS, please contact our sales team at 800-444-4443.
• Existing Window-Eyes SMAs will be rolled into the JAWS SMA program for end users that migrate to JAWS.

Detailed upgrade and SMA pricing information is provided below.
To make this process as easy as possible, we ask you to complete a simple web form that will go directly to our sales team, who will then contact you with an authorization code for JAWS 18, or request additional information if necessary.
Requests for upgrades must be submitted at http://www.gwmicro.com/window-eyes/migrateform or by phone at 800-444-4443 by July 31, 2017. Note, the free Window-Eyes Offer for Users of Microsoft Office version is not part of the conversion program.

So I’m sitting here watching my iPhone update when suddenly it occurs to me that about three years ago I wrote a whole thing about needing a new computer but not being sure what I should get. It then dawns on me that I never did finish that story and let everyone know what I decided to do, so why not take care of that now?

One of the major reasons it took me this long to finish the story is because well, the story just finished. Yes, here in 2017 I finally got the new computer I was after in 2014. Thanks, life. Some of what happened has been covered elsewhere in pretty good detail, but the TLDR version is a whole bunch of stuff happened (about 98% of it to poor Carin) that sent get new computer system tumbling way down the priority list for more than a year. In the meantime I’d also gotten the old shitbox working again, and it was able to get me bye.

At the time I didn’t mind all of its slowness and stupidity because it was just nice to have something functional. And hey, it meant I didn’t waste the several hundred dollars I’d sunk into fixing it. But I absolutely let it go for way too long, to the point where it was becoming far more of a hindrance than it was a help. If you were wondering why I hadn’t been as talkative here or on Twitter as I used to be and have become again, mystery solved. Doing the simplest of things took sometimes 3 or more times longer than they should have because garbage ass computer.

But as of this January, that’s not a problem anymore, thank Christ.

So what’d I get?

The answer is not a Mac. Yes, I stuck with Windows, for quite a few reasons.

PCs are easier to take apart and repair, for one. I can have anyone I trust to know shit from putty in here to fix anything that goes wrong and is beyond my capabilities as opposed to lugging the damn thing all the way to the Apple Store.

I also did a lot of reading and talking to people, and I really started noticing that folks (particularly the blind ones) aren’t nearly as on board the Apple train as they used to be. Accessibility bugs not getting fixed, new ones popping up regularly, the Mac equivalents of things not working at all or not being able to do what a person needed, the lack of accessibility options (browser and screenreader combinations in particular) that I was worried about all along, the Mac Mini I thought about buying not being able to function properly with Voiceover unless it had a monitor plugged into it which kind of defeated the purpose…there were a lot of things.

But what about the virtual machine? Best of both worlds, right?

Uh…no.

I’m sure for some people it works just great, and I’m happy for those people. But I’ve seen that setup in action and let me tell you something, it ain’t fucking happening. Not in this house, not on my watch. Carin, the poor sap, runs a Mac laptop with a Windows VM as her work computer, and it’s the absolute drizzling shits. Watching her struggle mightily just to get the damn thing out of sleep mode and talking so she can do something as basic as send an email causes me physical and mental anguish. Maybe that wouldn’t have happened to me, but no way in hell was I spending that much money to take that chance.

So I’m now running a lovely new desktop complete with Windows 10, and a couple months in I’m quite confident that I made the right decision. It’s fast, it does everything I want and need a computer to do and so far at least, it’s come with none of the hassle and inconvenience it looked like the Mac would have.

I can’t tell you how awesome it’s been to be able to work up to my own speed again. I’m looking forward to using this thing for years to come, although hopefully not quite as many years as the last one.