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Text to speech is still pretty distinguishable as not-human, and that seems like an easier problem (only has to work for one specific voice, not an arbitrary voice). So just on the basis alone I wonder if this isn't still a ways out

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Interesting thought: is it easier or more difficult to make a synthetic voice undistinguishable from a human one, compared to producing speech copying a real voice?

To me, at least, the voices I heard in Lyrebird's demo actually sounded more 'real' than Microsoft Sam for example.

Of course, the voices produced by Lyrebird sound more "real" than Microsoft Sam, since I would define realness as sounding humanlike. However, I would strongly prefer Microsoft Sam over something generated by this algorithm for general use because this algorithm produces voices that are still in an uncanny valley, because it is almost human but not human enough, whereas Microsoft Sam is obviously not human.

I would argue that it depends on the sample rate. Over the telephone there are several TTS voices that are very convincing because the audio quality is lower.

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