Gcarter08

Yea I tried to squeeze info into the title - could def be better. But no this is referencing the southern states in America.

Yes those are the ones for this model that performed consistently well.

Yes, exactly. This version focuses on giving the ability to consistently represent those voices well. The future versions will be even more fine-grained where you can scope it even more detailed if you wanted.

For example, right now if you say you want a Southern American accent, you might get a voice that is a Black person from Atlanta or Rural Georgia in future versions you will be able to specify Atlanta or rural, etc.. same with the regional African accents.

Good question, those are all different accents we are pointing out this model does well with, but it also does well with White American accents that are usually represented well, not only the Black voices (including White southern voices).

We are calling out Southern American, and the regional African English (e.g. a person with a regional Nigerian (igbo) accent speaking english, or someone with a regional Kenya (Swahili) accent that is still speaking english). Those are all different but all represented well in this model.

Those were not a catch all for black americans.

thank you.. and agreed - that's why we decided to work on this because the tech is fascinating, but the representation is far behind. We have commercial rights for the data - that allowed us to create eval datasets but also build models.

lol and there is more to come... we have more data, and can create even more fine grained controls for the model outputs

Thanks for the tip, I will look into it. We wanted to broaden the model to include voices and accents from regions I don't typically hear or they might sound comical or like a caricature

You can try this link to the huggingface spaces page https://huggingface.co/spaces/destined/hurston-1

I also have a demo phone line 678.940.8800 with a few of the voices

There will be some creators who will take this deal…tends to be the high volume producers who will see this as a pure numbers game. As a creator myself who licenses content for AI, this would be a lot lower than our going rate, so I’d pass.