This doesn't answer the question, but I thought it might be relevant to mention here that I've been using chatGPT + resemble.ai to create what I believe is the first kid's stories podcast created entirely by AI.
Here's how it works:
- Kid requests a story about a, b, c on www.makedupstories.com
- chatGPT generates the text for a story, summary, and title
- we send this to resemble.ai (sounds like Tortoise TTS would work just as well), which has a clone of my voice
In every HN thread there are tangential subthreads, including plugs.
Personally - despite being neither the target market or that interested in an answer to the original question, I found the reply you are objecting to interesting and useful, and not at all the crass promo you are claiming.
I'm not exactly trying to grow my kids stories podcast by plugging it to a developer audience. My comment is relevant because it's a cutting edge use case of text-to-speech.
This is such a cynical, unhelpful response. Someone asked HN for recommendations for text-to-speech software. I provided a recommendation and explained my use-case. I wasn't trying to grow my audience by posting this comment. I was trying to explain how I combined two new AI technologies to create a new offering. Of course I could be wrong, but based on my decade-plus experience on Hacker News, I think that this is precisely the kind of project PG intended to be discussed here when he created Hacker News.
Well, to state the obvious, OP chose not to google it and to ask HN instead, which is why I provided a technology recommendation and an example of a solution I hacked together using the technology.
I don’t really get why you’re doubling down on your obvious self-promotion. You literally started with “This doesn’t answer the question…” but now you’re claiming that you did answer the question by providing a technology recommendation?
I'm defending myself vigorously because I truly wasn't trying to promote myself, despite what you claim. I took time out of my busy day to explain on this forum my use-case for text to speech, which combines two AI technologies and happens to involve kid's stories. I did not ask people to follow or subscribe to the podcast - that is you putting words in my mouth. I thought this audience would find this use-case interesting because this is Hacker News and I hacked together this solution. I also started my answer with "This doesn't answer the question" because it's not a literal list of TTS technologies; instead, it provides an interesting example of how I used one such technology.
How do you make sure that children don't get inappropriate content? I know ChatGPT is pretty good at filtering already but to me it seems like a high risk undertaking - a single lapse can sink your ship.
I anyone else bothered by "maked up" in the url? Granted my grammar is slipping as I get older, but it doesn't sound like correct English to me. If incorrect, it feels a bit odd to be reinforcing something like that in the context of storytelling, which I would hope, is partly about the grammar being used.
I'm assuming they were trying to imitate a child's manner of speech - i.e. children tend to lack the experience with language to know about a lot of special cases with the English past tense, leading to "eated" and "fighted", etc. The website name is just a play on words based on this.
This is correct. Hopefully whatever improvement children get in their imagination by listening to these stories will offset whatever minor regression in language skills a child may experience due to this semantical humor, which indeed is intended to follow the form of a typical child's mistake.
That's not true. There's joy in making kids happy. Here's actual feedback from kids:
"Hi richardfeynman and Merry Christmas!
Carissa enjoyed her story and decided after that she needs to submit another one
She couldn’t tell a difference. My husband and I could tell it was different, but still pretty impressive how the AI works! We will share with friends this week!"
"Thank you so much for the story of Anders and his goat Gizmo. We love Maked up Stories and listen to one every evening, so it really made Anders’s day to have his own story. We have shared it with family and friends."
Are you kidding? there's tons of joy. I have a backlog of hundreds of kids story requests and now instead of being able to satisfy one kid per day I can satisfy as many as I want. moreover, kids can't tell the difference and love the stories.
They're too young to articulate the difference caused by a lack of emotion in the storytelling; but as kids, they are still early enough in their developmental process that I imagine hearing massive amounts of spoken audio, which lacks emotional depth, will harm them. I'd be cautious.
On the one hand, there's clear empirical evidence from parents that this helps improve kids' imagination and storytelling ability, and on the other hand we have your pure conjecture that "spoken audio which lacks emotional depth" can harm kids. I'm not buying it, but even if it were true it's pretty clear by the rate of improvement in voice cloning that soon there will be more emotional depth in this form of audio.
From your other comment with the parent's feedback -
> She couldn’t tell a difference. My husband and I could tell it was different [...]
I wonder if the child will eventually be able to tell the difference, when the machine-generated audio is a large fraction of what they hear in their early years. Or if they just learn to consider that 'normal', and maybe model their own speech patterns after it.
Also, anecdotes from parents (is that what you're referring to by "clear empirical evidence"?) are not evidence.
Current literacy theory believes there is an education gap formed between pre-school age children that hear a lot of words vs. those that don’t get to hear as many.
There exists an interpretation of that statement that makes it a tautology.
Edit: and/or makes it circular/symmetrical - "What is a "kid"" (a Turing test mis-labeller). A good AGI was required to be able to convince a panel - assuming an ideal panel, the usual simplification "employing" perfect agents in economic modelling -, and there now exist new means to conversely assess the panel.
I like your creativity. If I did not know it was AI, it would be hard for me to tell.
I'm not a kid and have no kids so it's hard for me to appreciate this type of storytelling. Have you been able to gather an audience that regularly tunes in?
If sitting your kids in front of an AI generated content farm bears little difference to sitting your kids in front of a human generated content farm, then yes, this is for you. It’s endless, zero marginal “entertainment” for your kids, an extra moment while you check your
Here's how it works:
- Kid requests a story about a, b, c on www.makedupstories.com
- chatGPT generates the text for a story, summary, and title
- we send this to resemble.ai (sounds like Tortoise TTS would work just as well), which has a clone of my voice
- the audio file then gets sent to anchor.fm
you can listen to example episodes here on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6liL4T3kJf1scHq134s0mJ
And here on Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/kidscast-kids-stories-...