How the voices for ChatGPT were chosen

https://openai.com/index/how-the-voices-for-chatgpt-were-chosen/

by saliagato • 2 years ago

54 71 2 years ago

openai.com

iamflimflam1• 2 years ago

Article doesn’t address the ridiculously giggly female voice they used for the 4o demos.

isoprophlex• 2 years ago

Fake, americanized, subtly sexualized. I'm pretty sad that they went for the lowest common denominator approach.

I'm not opposed to computers using emotion at all, mind you. But I don't like that arguably the AI company furthest ahead is choosing this gaudy hollywood approach to marketing.

dkersten• 2 years ago

The male voice they used didn’t have these qualities…

I personally hated the female voice, it wasn’t pleasant to listen to. I found it quite grating, making the demo hard to watch.

riffraff2• 2 years ago

Desi Lydic on the Daily Show had a perfect take on this

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/51ucQ4s7Crc

lstamour• 2 years ago

The full episode is even better, the clip above ends a minute early...

msoad• 2 years ago

Berlin famously casted a gender neutral voice for public transport announcements. It would be nice if OpenAI would have done that too. At least for one of the options. Computers better not have genders imo

iLoveOncall7• 2 years ago

Why?

thomashop11• 2 years ago

Because assigning genders to computers makes as much sense as giving your toaster a name, it’s 2024, so why not keep the gender out of it?

The why question is easily answered if you see how many negative reactions their choice of voice caused. A gender-neutral voice would have just avoided annoying a certain percentage of the population, including me.

I'm happy if advertising stops hitting the sexy/cliched stereotypes.

Sometimes the Guardian goes a bit far but OpenAI could have avoided this kind of article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/1...

(Edit: I guess I was being slightly inflammatory with my first sentence. I think the default voice should be gender-neutral and then let the user choose what makes them happy. I don't think it was clever of OpenAI to use a sexy female as the default voice in their demos as evidenced by us having this discussion)

AnonymousPlanet• 2 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if the person voicing those announcements would be more happy to be called female than gender neutral.

thomashop11• 2 years ago

She's trans, so probably yes. But in an interview she says she is very happy to having been chosen as the gender-neutral voice of Berlin's subway.

avereveard• 2 years ago

I'd love a glados voice or a extremely synthesized one 80s style. I'm using an open one for now, and I think it's very appropriate.

arianvanp• 2 years ago

https://www.tiktok.com/@openlynews/video/7260846856228326682...

If you're interested in her voice

GaggiX5• 2 years ago

What is a gender neutral voice? Something that is interpolated between a male and a female voice?

thomashop11• 2 years ago

https://www.ted.com/talks/nis_norgaard_how_to_create_a_gende...

Spiwux• 2 years ago

They're clearly trying to imitate human interaction, and believe it or not, the vast majority of humans have genders they're perfectly happy with.

ahofmann• 2 years ago

Well, but it is not a human. It's a talking computer and trying to sound not like a computer is disingenuous, creepy and heavily misleading. The movie "her" made a good point about that.

xdennis2• 2 years ago

Berlin famously casted a gender neutral voice for public transport announcements.

The person in question is transsexual. You're saying that regular men and women aren't neutral but transsexuals are?

Computers better not have genders imo

This doesn't make any sense. Gender is an intrinsic part of many languages which cannot be ripped out. It's impossible to talk in some languages without picking a way of speaking which is either masculine or feminine.

datahack2• 2 years ago

Am I the only one that really dislikes these overly perky voices? And the one they used for the demo was GOD AWFUL. If this is what the future sounds like… idk. I was hoping for a calm, neutral and not eager assistant with a little class. A little Jarvis maybe? Something calm and easy on the ears.

These all sounded to me like people auditioning for a role in film and television or something.

genericacct• 2 years ago

You're not alone. But it should be an easy fix with voice cloning proceeding as fast as it is.

anotherhue• 2 years ago

Simulation complete. Enter when ready.

datahack2• 2 years ago

I’m hoping. That’s a good point.

It really sounded like people from central casting. The fact that is was exactly that is hilarious to me.

Your point is well advised!

echelon• 2 years ago

OpenAI won't be setting the mood once open source catches up. They have no moat. This is just another flashy demo attempting to throw shade at Google.

There were already AI products with exactly this behavior (perhaps sans multi-modality) prior to OpenAI's demo. Some of them were even open source. And these products will cater to the things we care about: local, niche, privacy-respecting, with bespoke domain expertise.

jimsimmons• 2 years ago

Google did a much better job here and everyone glossed over

DeathArrow• 2 years ago

I would like something more David Attenborough-ish.

jgrahamc• 2 years ago

I would like the voice of HAL: soft and calm.

exitb• 2 years ago

This is contextual, the model seems to match the user vibe and the general situation. Take a look at the "Customer service proof of concept" video added to the announcement post[1] - there are two AIs talking using very different voices.

[1] https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/

vlasky• 2 years ago

I'm surprised that you can't configure the pace or pitch of the voices. The Web Speech API, around for a long time, has that capability. I'd also love to have the option of Australian and British accents.

iLoveOncall7• 2 years ago

I use "Cove" which is much more tame that the other by default and (I assume that's the case for all) matches your tone.

So if I'm asking it a question on a neutral tone it will answer in the same way.

OutOfHere• 2 years ago

Cove is the only acceptable voice they have.

jareklupinski• 2 years ago

i want jonah jameson from the spiderman movies yelling things at me

omarfarooq• 2 years ago

Would it be possible to use prompting to change aspects of the voice output? Will the voice respond angrily if you ask to act an angry character in a play?

prolyxis• 2 years ago

Yes. This was a big part of the GPT-4o demos. But likely they've specifically fine-tune it not to show negative emotions in a serious fashion.

iLoveOncall7• 2 years ago

You don't even have to prompt it, it will match your tone.

LeoPanthera• 2 years ago

None of the voices really seem that good to me. I think it's because they're all aggressively American. It would be nice to hear some other accents.

Joeri• 2 years ago

I had Sky answer in dutch, and hearing dutch with an american accent is funny but a little jarring. The frustrating part of being a flemish dutch speaker is that dutch itself is already poorly served by AI tools (it’s actually impressive chatgpt can do it at all) and additionally the flemish accent and dialects are not supported at all in pretty much anything, so all dutch text to speech sounds foreign.

I hope eventually they can pick up language, dialect and accent from youtube content or something like that, because voice casting will never scale to the thousands of variations they need to have to support a global audience. Instead of picking a voice from a handful of choices it should do a q&a where it learns your locale and intonation preferences and generates a tailored voice on the fly.

Still, I am impressed with the quality of the voices they have and with how well they manage dutch. It is just the case that there still is a lot of room for growth.

nacnud• 2 years ago

As a British person, I find all the current OpenAI voices have overly strong (American) accents, which are way too perky/enthusiastic for my ears. It would be great if they could offer a more neutral accent, or even one British accent? (Example: Voice 5 from pi.ai is excellent, IMHO)

glimshe• 2 years ago

Some British accents, in particular outside of London, can be almost unintelligible to general English speakers.

There is nothing intrinsically neutral about the British accent, it's more a matter of diction from the speaker. I would also not consider the OpenAI accents as neutral American, feels more like "Young Californian adult woman" accent to me.

MrSkelter• 2 years ago

You don’t seem to have a point. Thick accents are unintelligible regardless of source.

The UK has more distinct accents than the US. However RP English, which was popular in an American form as “mid Atlantic” last century, is almost impossible for any English speaker to misconstrue thanks to its emphasis on clear diction. British actors have been proving that in the US for over a century. No one needs subtitles to understand Hugh Grant. Standard US accents frequently fail the merry, marry, Mary test and are worse overall.

Even us Americans know this. The classic, original, beloved voice of the NY subway was a British guy faking a “flat” American accent.

input_sh• 2 years ago

I can't help but read this as:

400 people did some unpaid work for us, only 5 of which eventually got paid, after 5 months of not knowing will they or won't they.

Fair enough, that's how things work for other voice acting jobs as well, I just doubt it usually takes almost half a year. I wonder how many of the shortlisted 14 have just given up somewhere along the way.

th0ma52• 2 years ago

From their Discord server: > @ everyone We’ve heard questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT, especially Sky. We are working to pause the use of Sky while we address them. Read more about how we chose these voices [link above, but no further details]

easymodex• 2 years ago

Wow, so they actually got bullied into removing the voice? What a world. I actually liked that voice or at least didn't find any issue with it, they are all perky assistant type voices, but why not? Adding extra choices is fine if people want it, but removing the voice due to loud minority effect is just sad.

th0ma52• 2 years ago

I don't agree with this outlook at all and I think it is apparent they took cues from sexual fantasies to be honest.

saurik2• 2 years ago

We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice—Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice. To protect their privacy, we cannot share the names of our voice talents.

I love how they have to go out of their way to explain that, rather than train a model on Scarlett Johansson's voice, they came about her voice honestly, by just finding someone who's natural voice sounded the most like Scarlett Johansson... as, clearly, no one is questioning that this voice was chosen to mimic Scarlett Johansson.

defrost• 2 years ago

Some are questioning why they chose not to mimic Stephen Fry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY or Attenborough.

Havoc• 2 years ago

Pretty sure that’s another joking reference to the movie Her rather than actual concern about similarity. If that was the case pointing it out would attract lawsuits

saurik2• 2 years ago

I mean... do you not think Sky sounds like Scarlett Johansson? I specifically use(d) that voice in no small part because of the to-me-pretty-obvious similarity.

(Note that if you select that voice today, you might not actually be using it anymore. I noticed earlier today I was shunted off to Juniper, which I didn't like as much.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40413209

gaymenexisttoo• 2 years ago

Sky has an uncomfortably flirty tone to me. If they're going to go that route, at least include an uncomfortably flirty male voice too. (Or admit Sky is there more for the enjoyment of straight male users than anything else)

thih9• 2 years ago

We support the creative community

I doubt the net result is support. Expanding creative community - yes. But support - not quite; established creators will likely suffer because of openai, most of them already having a harder time.

How the voices for ChatGPT were chosen

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