SoundStorm: Efficient Parallel Audio Generation
In CGI there were always these milestones which I observed getting reached. Like trees with leaves finally looking close to realistic, wind blowing in grass looking almost realistic, hair, jelly, and it were usually Pixar shorts pointing out what they have been focusing on and then seeing it applied to their movies.<p>Then mocap, mapping digital faces on real actors which was first mind-blowing to see in Pirates of the Caribbean, then the apes in one of the Planet of the Apes movies... So much in the CGI industry has already reached a point where the hardest problems seem to have been solved.<p>When I now clicked play on the first Synthesized Dialoge from Dialogue Synthesis "Where did you go last summer? | I went to Greece, it was amazing.", I was blown away. It's as if we've now reached one of those milestones where a problem appears to be fixed or cracked. Machines will be able to really sound like humans, indistinguishable from them.<p>10-5 years ago, if you wanted to deal with TTS, the best option you had was to let your Android phone render a TTS into an audio file, because everything else sounded really bad. Specially Open Source stuff sounded absolutely horrible.<p>So how long will it be until we will be able to download something of this quality onto a future-gen Raspberry Pi which can do some AI processing, where we make an HTTP call and it starts speaking through the audio out in a perfect voice without relying on the cloud? 5 years?