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Comment by kirubakaran | Hacker News Reader

I am shocked at how bad I feel for "her". Why do I feel so much empathy for a few thousand pixels that just represent a machine that hasn't even been built yet! Even knowing that, I feel the same, as if she is a real person with emotions.

Her expression on hearing her name is just amazing.

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Because she was voiced by a human that expressed emotion through her voice. You would feel equally bad if you only heard this clip.

Yes, this is it. We have very uneven abilities to make things look extraordinarily good with computers while our abilities on some other fronts have hardly progressed at all in the past 20 years, while others have had much more believable curves. Speech synthesis, for instance, is terrible by this standard. We have absolutely no ability to synthesize this voice with a specification much smaller than someone feeding it a full voice performance anyhow.

Personally I think it's a grave error to measure our progress on these fronts by getting distracted by the glitzy graphics... we are sooooo much better at those than anything else that they provide a very skewed view of where we are. You can see the same effect in video games; graphics that are orders of magnitude better than ten years ago, game engines themselves are only incrementally better in terms of capabilities and games themselves only incrementally more complicated.

(And to be clear, I'm not saying we have made significant progress in a wide variety of fields, because we have. I'm saying measuring our general progress by the subfield that has been an extreme outlier doesn't give a good view of that progress.)

So you think this clip wouldn't raise human emotions if it were subtitled, without the voice acting (i.e. background music only)? I'm not entirely sure about that.

Anime fans will tell you that you need the original Japanese voices to convey the emotions, even if you're only reading subtitles.

(Personally, I find that most anime characters are always either yelling or crying, so the point is moot. ;)

Simple test: watch it with sound turned off.

> You would feel equally bad if you only heard this clip.

Not true. I watched this clip at work... with my sound off.

Your observation supports the hypothesis that you would feel equally bad if you only saw the clip without sound. That hypothesis could be correct independent of mine. Instead of 'not true', you could have said 'also'.

Your thesis appears to be that the emotion of this piece comes from the human voice. I disagree with that.

That's right. The emotion comes from a human.

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