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Callers to Washington state hotline press 2 for Spanish and get accented AI English instead (apnews.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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For months, callers to the Washington state Department of Licensing who have requested automated service in Spanish have instead heard an AI voice speaking English in a strong Spanish accent. The agency has since apologized and says it’s trying to fix the problem.

AI is putting threatening to put The Onion out of business, not because The Onion articles can be written by AI, rather AI has just made this kind of satire nearly obsolete. The Onion is forced to retreat into existential screaming into the void humor, which they have done magnificently in the face of an unstoppable foe. The Onion will prevail and outlive AI though, mark my words!

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[–] 90 points 8 months ago (6 children)

This is hilarious. I work on translation software and know exactly what's wrong. They've selected a spanish voice, but not translated the content to spanish. I was playing around with these settings in our software and produced exactly this result.

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  • [–] 19 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    It'd be hilarious if you could choose that as an option. I'd like to pick between a hundred different accents. lol

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago* (4 children)

    You can do this with a good deal of TTS programs.

    It can be very funny to give a paragraph in English to a Portuguese or Japanese or French TTS model.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Back in the 80s, my dad worked with telephone testing equipment and had reason to bring home a DecTalk. I spent so much time fucking around with that thing. Typing things like "sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit" was so hilarious. I'd write entire scripts.

    I guess the tech is to the point now where I could lose days to it now. lol.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    I'm a bit younger, but early Ventrilo had a TTS that basically was so bad, and so easy to spam and break with nonsense that servers would either have it totally turned off, or kick/ban you if you spammed soi soi soi or something.

    ... And then of course.... there was that one time John Madden made it to the Moon...

    Or.... you can turn it into music:

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=T9vXGlaNKg0

    I... guess you could call that TTS acapella?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    There's a few DECtalk projects on Github (main, but there's other repos too) that people seem to be working on, including one for the game engine Godot. That one seems to have some problems (need to move files, broken OotB for me, broken dictionary after all that), but I was able to make a script (see my comment here) to properly call+play it.

    They have plaintalk too and that's what I was initially interested in, was trying to get it through WASM (for multi-platform) but even after the above I'm still lost.

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