Subledger: APIs for Accounting - <AUTHOR> http://subledger.com

<comment><USER2> I'm cofounder of Scripted.com and we're probably subledger's first major integration. We did it because we didn't want to put an engineering FTE on dealing with money in our app. Timing was good so we went for it! And I'm glad we did. All told I think we deleted some 9,000 lines of code.

Great team but integration needs some work. I'm sure they'll get there and I'm glad we could be the guinea pigs. Go ahead, AMA!

</comment><comment><USER3> Hello there!

I'm a founder, and this has brought us a lot of traffic! THANK YOU!

We believe that all APIs must be built in a secure and robust fashion. We use techniques similar other online accounting apps.

I don't believe our responsibilities are greater or lesser than theirs, but I do appreciate your feedback. We will certainly spell out our security better!

Specifically, here are some details that should ease your concerns.

All traffic is SSL encrypted. We receive an A+ on [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/)

We require two randomly created tokens (key/secret) for authentication. Both are 22 character Base 62 strings, so the combined key space is greater than 256 bits.

We allow for overlapping keys to encourage regular rotation.

We use BCrypt for secret hashing to avoid brute force attacks.

All data creation operations will not return success until your data is written to two independent datacenters.

We stream versioned resource backups into our own S3 bucket, and optionally a bucket owned and controlled by our customers.

With Subledger it really is your data!

<comment><USER4> As I hinted at in another comment, this info should be on your website. I get the flat layout and all, but I think you'll want to AB test using the abstract description of features ("Google Analytics for money", "a precise, scalable double-entry accounting ledger", etc) with the bullet points you mentioned in the this post and in your FAQ.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Very clear and happy about all your feedback. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really neat idea but I'm surprised that a company who needs me to send them intimate accounting data makes no mention of what they're doing to ensure my data is safe and secure.

Building an API is relatively simple, protecting sensitive financials is not.

<comment><AUTHOR> this is in a FAQ in the email after you signup for beta

"Q) Does Subledger store data safely and securely?

A) Yes. Subledger runs entirely on Amazon's AWS, which itself is compliant with HIPAA, SOC 1/SSAE 16/ISAE 3402 (formerly SAS70), SOC 2, SOC 3, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, FedRAMP(SM), DIACAP and FISMA, ITAR, FIPS 140-2, CSA and MPAA. Subledger itself has not yet been certified. We take your data security and safety very seriously: when Subledger says it has received your data, it has already been stored in two separate data centers.

Q) Does Subledger provide disaster recovery?

A) Yes. Subledger makes real time backups of transactions as you create them. Our storage system has a stated durability of 99.999999999%. Subledger can optionally mirror your transactions to a separate geographic location. With multiple copies in diverse georgraphic locations, your data is extraordinarily durable.

Q) Do I need to replace what I've already built?

A) No. Subledger can exist alongside anything that's already in place.

Q) Is accessing my financial data over the internet secure?

A) Yes. All communications to and from Subledger are TLS/SSL encrypted which is the modern standard for over the internet security.

Q) Do you have strong authentication and authorization?

A) Yes. We employ a gigantic keyspace (7.3322e+78 combinations) key/secret authentication with support for rolling key updates."

<comment><USER4> There's little value in putting this information in the FAQ after I signup. You'll never even see my email if I can't have this level of confidence in your service. The site is pretty and flat and has decent copy, but this isn't a to do list app.

<comment><USER3> I hear you loud and clear, will get site updated!

Thank you for your clear and concise feedback, very much appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The links (blog, etc) on the "App" screen are all using SSL, which doesn't appear to be configured properly:

"You attempted to reach subledger.com, but instead you actually reached a server identifying itself as *.wpengine.com."

<comment><USER3> Yikes, apologies.

Will get that fixed ASAP, thanks for pointing his out.

<comment><USER3> Fixed now.

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't really understand what you guys do. Are you just a cloud database for account balances, and we send you journal entries? And then you process the financial statements? I assume you don't automatically process the notes to the FS?

<comment><USER3> It's reasonable to consider us as a double-entry accounting data store. But we don't just store balances, we store the entire audit trail, including links to source documentation.

As such, we make it easy to show customers and vendors realtime account statements, just like your bank does.

We also provide simple manual tools to allow humans to view and make manual entries as required via our iOS and web app.

We do not handle payment, but we do allow you to account for the payments you request and receive from other vendors.

Finally, we make it trivial to account for splits in marketplace applications, and liability positions in any prepaid models. For instance, gift card accounting is a natural fit for us.

In short, we simplify building core financial functionality for applications by providing developers an API to track money in the worldwide standard manner for the last 500 years. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just saying you'll have a REST API doesn't give me enough reason to sign up for an invite. Your API could be an joy to work with, or I might burn a week and a half just getting the initial auth working.

<comment><USER3> We're not satisfied with our documentation, which is why we don't give direct API access at this time.

Understand your input, appreciate it a lot. Thanks!

<comment><USER7> Considering that the API is you product, getting it documented should probably be you #1 priority. Even a rudimentary documentation, which you can then update later, would be better than none.

<comment><USER3> Hey there. Yes, agree, thank you, but depends upon how many eyes you want on it along the way.

Said another way: didn't realize that today was Hacker News day! :-)

We DO have [https://api.subledger.com](https://api.subledger.com) which is Swagger documentation, but we lack a directed HOWTO document that describes double-entry accounting and how our API represents it.

Believe me, we're working on it! :-)

<comment><USER4> I've been using Apiary to document some APIs, and it seems pretty easy to add in-line explanation in Markdown.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I'll take a look!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We are building something very similar as an internal project to support our payment systems, wish this had been available 2 years ago!

<comment><USER3> I wish it was available two years ago too!

Next time, or this time if you'd like to compare us against your internal implementation. :-)

<comment><USER8> I have already forwarded the link to our team, we will be evaluating it to see if it fits for us.

<comment><USER3> Thank you, kind sir!

Let me know if I can help in any way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Backed By Andreessen Horowitz & Draper Associates, Created by a co-founder of Engine Yard

<comment><USER3> Who we think rock! They saw the future we see and helped us build it!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: My wife might lose the ability to speak in 3 weeks – how to prepare? - <AUTHOR> My wife will be undergoing significant oral surgery in a few weeks and there is a SMALL chance she may lose the ability to speak. I'd like to prepare, just in case, to have technology to reproduce her voice from keyboard or other input.
My ideal would be an open source "deepfake toolkit" that allows me to provide pre-recorded samples of her speech and then TTS in her voice.  Unfortunately most articles and tools I'm finding are anti-deepfake.  Any recommendations?
Fallback would be recording her speaking "phonetic pangrams" and then using her pre-recorded phonemes to recreate speech that sounds like her. I feel like the deepfake toolkit is the way to go.  Appreciate any recommendations... There must be open source tools for this?? <comment><USER3> Hey, speech ML researcher here. Make sure you have different recordings of different contexts. fifteen.ai's best TTS voices use ~90 min of utterances, some separated by emotion. If you're having her read a text, make sure it's engaging--we do a lot of unconscious voicing when reading aloud. Tbh, if she has a non-Anglophone accent, you're going to need more because the training data is biased towards UK/US speakers.

If you want to read up on the basics, check out the SV2TTS paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.04558.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.04558.pdf) Basically you use a speaker encoding to condition the TTS output. This paper/idea is used all over, even for speech-to-speech translation, with small changes.

There's a few open-source version implementations but mostly outdated--the better ones are either private for business or privacy reasons.

There's a lot of work on non-parallel transfer learning (aka subjects are saying different things) so TTS has progressed rapidly and most public implementations lag a bit behind the research. If you're willing to grok speech processing, I'd start with NeMo for overall simplicity--don't get distracted by Kaldi.

Edit: Important note! Utterances are usually clipped of silence before/after so take that into account when analyzing corpus lengths. The quality of each utterance is much much more important than the length--fifteen.ai's TTS is so good primarily because they got fans of each character to collect the data.

<comment><USER4> I came here to say this. My brother has a PhD in chemistry and no coding experience. He was able to create a voice model of himself using basic nvidia example generators in a week. My dad lost his voice and it would have been very nice to have a TTS that was much more close to him. I personally would think it would be worth it to have that database.

But obviously also attend to the human matters as well, eg spend time.

<comment><USER3> I work in pathological speech processing/synthesis so I'm unfortunately familiar with your father's position. It really sucks that these people didn't know that archiving their voice would've been useful. I hear snippets that people manage to glean from family videos right after listening to their current voices and it makes me really sad.

On the upside, your father can choose any celebrity he wants to voice him! Tons of celeb data is publicly available (VoxCeleb 1 & 2).

<comment><USER5> Is Morgan Freeman the most used celebrity?

<comment> core-questions I'd go for Stephen Hawking, myself.

(Not using his voice synth, reconstructed using ML, because it should sound more natural that way ;-)

<comment><USER6> I recall that the "say" program on the SGI from the mid 90's was approximately Hawking's voice. Hawking gave his speech for the Whitehouse Millennium Lecture at SGI also, and while I wasn't able to attend I found the transcript of it and fed it in there... there were some jokes that he had that only really came through with the intonation and pacing of a voice synth -- its the ultimate dead pan voice.

[https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16112](https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16112) [https://youtu.be/orPUQm1ZRSI](https://youtu.be/orPUQm1ZRSI)

And his voice was his - even with the American accent.

[https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/why-stephen- ha...](https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/why-stephen-hawkings- voice-computer-spoke-with-an-american-accent/news- story/d4529ffb6341278d8c1b33e06cd3099c)

> "It is the best I have heard, although it gives me an accent that has been > described variously as Scandinavian, American or Scottish."

> ...

> "It has become my trademark and I wouldn't change it for a more natural > voice with a British accent.

> "I am told that children who need a computer voice want one like mine."

Somewhere, I recall a NOVA(?) program from the mid 80s where it showed him using the speech synthesizer and the thing that he said with it that still sticks in my mind is the "please excuse my American accent". In later years he was given the opportunity to upgrade it to a more natural sounding voice - <USER2> that voice was his.

<comment><USER7> Near the end of his life, his original voice computer started to fall apart. He managed to get in touch with the people who wrote the software, who started a mad scramble to find source, and ultimately ended up emulating the whole setup on a Pi.

[https://theweek.com/articles/769768/saving-stephen- hawkings-...](https://theweek.com/articles/769768/saving-stephen-hawkings- voice)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My mom lost her ability to speak, and what you are going to find is that your life and how you interact with everyone will have to change. Human verbal communication is very fast. She will find it difficult to be part of normal conversations. Without lots of help, she will start to fade into the background of conversations, because she can't keep up. You will have to help her be a part of things. It will be a depressing experience for her, and you will have to help her. People will look at her differently like she is mentally handicapped. (I know she won't be, but people will assume that she is even unconsciously). I recommend finding her a therapist if she has to go through this transition.

<comment><USER9> Seems like a great application for Elon's Neuralink.

<comment><USER10> Who needs therapy when you have technology that doesn't exist yet!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Record her reading the texts of a standardized text training corpus.

That way, you can retrain an existing AI to do text to speech with her own voice.

Edit: here's a link to the corpus that I believe Mozilla uses [http://www.openslr.org/12/](http://www.openslr.org/12/)

<comment><USER12> Is she on board with this? I can imagine a lot of people being severely put off by being asked to record "a corpus of approximately 1000 hours" in advance of what sounds like a stressful surgery.

<comment><USER13> Seconding this, also, reproducing her voice with an AI may not be something she is on board with, it could make her feel like you don't accept her with or without a voice. It may also be unhealthy for you, similar to how spending too long on social media can become a dangerous source of dopamine.

It might make sense to consider making a recording that is more meaningful, and focus on giving her emotional support rather than building an AI that could be perceived as a replacement.

<comment><USER14> It's not like OP is replacing her entirity with Alexa, if I were the wife I'd think "sure, let's 'backup' my voice, having it available in case I lose mine would be useful, so that people can still hear my thoughts in my voice instead of a robot's."...

<comment><USER15> > if I were the wife I'd think "sure, let's 'backup' my voice"

That very well seems to be the OP's position as well. That's a far more generous reading of the situation. It makes sense that someone here would have the mindset of "lets keep a backup in case we want access to it later."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would also suggest looking into learning American Sign Language (of course alongside this project). While communicating via keyboard is workable and good for communicating with the wider world, ASL would be much more convenient for communicating between you two -- and a very interesting language to boot. It is a foreign language thats not related to English besides a few loan words, but there's tons of online resources and most universities have classes as well. Plus, you also can experience beautiful Deaf culture, with a rich storytelling and poetic tradition that blends language, gesture, acting, and pantomime in a way thats just impossible to translate to a spoken language.

The downvoted commenter was being a jerk, but I do think learning ASL is an option worth looking into.

<comment><USER17> I think your answer misses the point of the question. Learning ASL can be done after the surgery if she lost her voice. The question was what can be done now before the surgery. The kind of things which, if it comes to the worst and she loses her voice, cannot be done after.

<comment><USER18> I wouldn't discount the value of having some rudimentary signs to communicate immediately after surgery. It seems odd to me to focus on some dream of a perfect TTS synthesis if these more basic needs are not addressed first.

If you've ever had a mouth injury that inhibits talking, or been in a foreign environment where your speech is totally useless, it can be very stressful to be unable to communicate. I think the couple should consider learning some of the basics ahead of time, so that communication is possible without typing or any other apparatus.

Considering post-surgery recovery window, I'd want to be able to express very basic things like:

I am comfortable

I am in pain

I am hungry

I am nauseated

I need to urinate/defecate

I want to rest

I love you

When will you return

etc. I might suggest trying to boil down one or two inside-joke kinds of phrases as well, to be able to lift each others spirits in private or intimate way.

<comment><USER19> a pen and paper would suffice for immediate communication needs.

<comment><USER20> If it must, but it isn't as smooth as conversation can be. sign language is a real language, and you can have real conversation, with all the pros and cons of real conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have a progressive neurodegenerative disease and lost most my ability to speak about 3 years ago. What you are proposing is super cool, but you might be overthinking this. These things (text to speech, etc) are more awkward than practical in real life. Also, make sure your wife is completely on board. Seeing old clips and hearing my voice is actually kind of depressing to me. Here is my actual advice:

Outside of social situations, it honestly hasn't been that big of deal for me. As a remote developer, my job has remained the same. My managers and co workers have been super supportive. I send messages during meetings to one person who will read it aloud for me.

With text and social media, I still keep up with friends and family. Most medical appointments, etc, can be made online. SprintIP relay is free for deaf/speech impaired, and it allows the caller to type what they want to say and a representative will relay this to the other party. It works via the web or a mobile app. [https://www.sprintrelay.com/sprintiprelay](https://www.sprintrelay.com/sprintiprelay)

Banks, brokers, or anything involving personal info (like SS#) usually requires a voice phone call. I have my wife call and explain the situation. I can whisper yes, as they occasionally require me to give permission. Some call center representatives have no idea how to handle this situation, and will just stick to the script saying they have to speak to me the entire time. My wife just thanks them, calls back, and hopes for someone more understanding.

There are awkward encounters where people don't know you can't speak, and will respond by speaking louder and slower. These people will also assume you are not intelligent and be dismissive. This is just one of the things you have to deal with.

I sincerely hope the procedure goes well and you wife doesn't have to deal with this. Just know that even if the worse happens, she can have a normal and productive life!

<comment><USER22> > There are awkward encounters where people don't know you can't speak, and > will respond by speaking louder and slower. These people will also assume > you are not intelligent and be dismissive. _This is just one of the things > you have to deal with._

It sucks you have to just deal with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> We get quite a few requests for this at Resemble ([https://resemble.ai](https://resemble.ai)). We can get her to record right on our website or you can upload an existing file (along with a video of her consent) on the platform. Feel free to shoot me a message and I'd be happy to help build a voice for her.

<comment><USER24> I dont know how to send messages but I researched this space a few years ago. Unfortunately a family member of mine had a surgery result in loss of his speech.

We have a lot of tapes around of his voice, from voice mails to family videos to some things from his work. If you are open to reaching out that would be awesome, I'll check out the site as well.

Edit: I've wanted to make some sort of soundboard + "text to talk" setup for this family member. He often can't participate in conversations because he writes on a whiteboard, and the speed of chatter moves faster than his writing

<comment><USER23> Feel free to shoot me an email: zohaib[at]resemble.ai

We also have an API that you might find useful for the soundboard project: [https://app.resemble.ai/docs](https://app.resemble.ai/docs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't know if you have kids/grandkids/nieces or nephews (or plan to have those) but it might be nice to record your wife reading some books out loud.

Not only will you have your own personal "audio books" of Harry Potter/The Hobbit/Chronicles of Narnia/Oi Frog/Alice in Wonderland/Roald Dahls etc etc for any kids/grandkids/relatives etc that will hopefully be something treasured in its own right, but you'll also have a large corpus of training data from well-known texts that you can retrain over and over as the tech improves in the future. Might be worth chucking in some other well-known texts to avoid over-fitting on a "kids' story voice" \- maybe something plain like inauguration speeches/declaration of independence/magna carta/etc.

Obviously I'd focus on gathering raw material now, and focus on the reconstruction later when you've all recovered mentally and physically to whatever happens. The more data the better when it comes to this sort of thing. There might not be something "simple" right now (e.g. you could probably implement the WaveNet or similar paper yourself today, and training it up on some GPUs in your spare room etc, but in a few years there might be a nice WYSIWYG/SaaS thing for it), but with the recordings safely stored you'll obviously be able to use it in the future.

Best of luck to you both.

<comment><USER26> I like this idea but the specific examples you give would almost certainly be a terrible idea. A voice trained on Tolkien or old American legalese like the Magna Carta would train a model with a lot of thee, thus, therefore and though art and undertrain it with modern English. His wife would sound like the second coming of Jesus or Shakespeare and less like a normal human being.

<comment><USER25> From what I understand, it is not the words themselves (thee etc) but the sounds that make the words - so the "th" and the "ee" are still legit sounds in modern English words. The network would just be synthesising the words you tell it to - it won't be picking the words for you.

I might be wrong though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't have any answers to give you, but I want to say that this is a really loving and beautiful thing you're trying to do.

<comment><USER28> Is it? My first thought was _"is your ideal also her ideal?"_.

We cannot rule out she wants to spend quality time with her partner instead of spending time in a recording studio, so that, if the worst outcome comes, her husband can remind her of what she lost.

<comment><USER27> Presumably the guy is better at guessing what his wife wants than you are, and his wife is an adult who can tell him if he guesses wrong.

<comment><USER29> > his wife is an adult who can tell him if he guesses wrong

She can, but she might not. A lot of that depends on how he presents the idea to her -- it might seem like something that's important to him.

<comment><USER30> It's sad that people trying to discuss the emotional side of this are being down voted.

Honestly there is no doubt a very large emotional/personal side of this, irrespective of who's idea it is and who supports it.

Technology isn't the solution for all problems and challenges in life.

<comment><USER31> No, it isn't.

But good lord, sometimes trying to get technical help on the Internet turns into this rabbithole of people who are specifically looking for ways _not_ to be helpful. "Did you really want that?" "Did you consider alternatives?" "What you _really_ have is an XY problem."

<comment><USER30> _" Truly identifying a problem means looking deeper at the symptoms, the customer, the impact, the alternatives, the opportunity, and the relationships between them, while avoiding the "solution bias" (often known as "The issue is that the customer does not use my solution")."_

#1 item from [https://www.molfar.io/blog/yc- questions](https://www.molfar.io/blog/yc-questions)

<comment><USER31> Or not. Not everything has to be this super-deep, six whys exploration of how craving and attachment is the cause of all suffering and if you would only stop wanting a solution you would no longer be in pain.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

<comment><USER30> If it was a cigar he'd just ask the technical question of how to capture and simulate someone's voice.

<comment><USER31> "I'd like to prepare, just in case, to have technology to reproduce her voice from keyboard or other input."

He then goes on to say "My ideal would be an open source 'deepfake toolkit' that allows me to provide pre-recorded samples of her speech and then TTS in her voice."

That sounds like wanting to capture and simulate someone's voice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Other resources you may want to explore are r/mute and r/deaf subreddits. Both also have Discord servers listed in the sidebars.

Having spent a good deal of time in hospitals, a few things I recommend... 10' phone cable since outlets can sometimes be far from the bed, cheap slippers she can wear to walk around (stepping in a hospital hallway mystery puddle wearing just socks is very unpleasant), comfy clothes that you don't mind having ruined (T-shirts, underwear, shirts, pajama pants - they can temporarily unhook the IV so she can put a T-shirt on), earplugs, eye mask. If she's going to be on liquid-only diet, bring your own since hospital food is not great, not terrible. Soylent/Orgain/Ensure if she's permitted that, otherwise good quality Italian ices are such a nice treat and most hospitals have a patient fridge/freezer you can store them in. Broth, but go to a restaurant or grocery store/farmers market with hot soup bar and fill a container with just the broth from the chicken noodle soup. It's INFINITELY better than boxed broth.

Hopefully all of your research and preparation will be for nothing, I wish you and your wife a successful surgery!

</comment><comment> dawg- Speech-language Pathology student here. I would recommend going to see a speech therapist. It will likely be covered by your health insurance. Find an SLP who specializes in AAC (Augmented and Alternative Communication) who can help your wife communicate if she loses her speech. Your DIY approach could work, but having support from an SLP to help her learn the system, and come up with other options if it doesn't cover all of her communication needs, will go a long way.

<comment><USER33> Upvoted and agreed 100%, from an AAC researcher. Your best bet is definitely going to be to reach out to an SLP with AAC expertise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just have her carry a good microphone at all times to record everything she says until that point, to have a maximum amount of samples. If you can't "deepfake" it today, maybe you will be able to do it tomorrow, but at least you will have the data.

<comment><USER35> "This conversation is being recorded for training and quality assurance purposes." Should be stated before each new interaction. The legal requirement will vary by jurisdiction but a lawyer can advise on that. And yes, I'm joking.

<comment><USER34> While this can be true, it depends in which state that you live in: [https://recordinglaw.com/party-two-party-consent- states/](https://recordinglaw.com/party-two-party-consent-states/) . In Illinois, it is apparently legal for the police to record you without consent but it is illegal for you to record the police...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Others here are addressing technical solutions, but I don't see anyone here covering non-verbal communication. IMO, that's going to be just as important.

I am going to assume that your wife and you have a healthy relationship with strong communication, in part because you've developed an intuition for her body language and other non-verbal communication methods. In the scenario where she loses her ability to speak, even if she happily and completely takes to whatever technical solution(s) you offer to replace that, I think it's likely she will reflexively lean more heavily on those non-verbal channels, and you're going to need to get better at reading them than you are now.

</comment><comment><USER37> This might get you started:

[https://speech.microsoft.com/customvoice](https://speech.microsoft.com/customvoice)

I imagine if MS offers custom voices then the other text to speech providers do as well.

Good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you - great lead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Some (decades old) research on this involved a research team creating a video of JFK saying "I never met Forrest Gump". I found a writeup in Google Books: [https://books.google.com/books?id=mQtGVQeQplcC&pg=PA208&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=mQtGVQeQplcC&pg=PA208&lpg=PA208&dq=%22I+never+met+forrest+gump%22&source=bl&ots=k3PobhFWaY&sig=ACfU3U3VlGf4aIdU1Q_JRllhb8AwVNzeLA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT7dyxkvrpAhUrHDQIHVUfDwQQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22I%20never%20met%20forrest%20gump%22&f=false)

> We evaluated our Kennedy results qualitatively along the following > dimensions: ... naturalness of the composited articulation; ...

Obviously the state of the art will have advanced, but maybe this can point the way toward more current research.

While I tend to agree with everyone else that this _can be_ a great idea, my instinct is to float the idea to your wife first and see how she responds. I can imagine someone taking this negatively.

<comment><USER38> There is a YouTube channel called "Speaking of AI" that makes short fake speeches of some US public figures. The quality is quite good and a bit frightening.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCID5qusrF32kSj- oSGq3rJg/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCID5qusrF32kSj- oSGq3rJg/videos)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> If she loses her ability to speak there are many ways to help her out, but nothing can replace the sound of her voice, especially for those important moments.

Just in case. Record specific messages for various people in her life, that can be used repeatedly, Children, Mom, Dad, siblings, in-laws, friends, messages like: "X, I love you", "X, I miss you.", "Mommy loves you!" "Give me a hug". "Holiday Greeting", "Happy Birthday","I'm so proud of you!" favorite happy saying, frustration saying,

You get the idea.

</comment><comment><USER40> What about recording messages to other people for future events (e.g. graduation of a child, birth of grandchild etc.)?

Recording a message to a yet unborn grandchild is maybe something we could all do!

</comment><comment><USER41> When my dad lost his speech, we had Boogie Board Jot devices all over the house. It made writing short notes and simple dialogs much less tedious.

We also used the Verbally premium iPad app to help give him a voice and make transactions on easier.

Wishing you all the best.

</comment><comment><USER11> The paper "Generalization Of Audio Deepfake Detection" gives an overview.

The paper [https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05441](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05441) has a list of spoofing methods.

Here's one method as paper [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.04558.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.04558.pdf)

And here on GitHub [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning)

</comment><comment><USER42> For an open-source approach, the MaryTTS project has a guide on how to add new voices to their tool: [https://github.com/marytts/marytts/wiki/VoiceImportToolsTuto...](https://github.com/marytts/marytts/wiki/VoiceImportToolsTutorial)

</comment><comment><USER43> You may want to look up what was done for Roger Ebert. He has lost his voice due to surgery, but because of the vast corpus of audio recordings of him, a viable text to speech engine was able to be created.

It's a bit dated at this point, but I imagine the research has vastly improved since then.

It's a very good question though. A decade ago this was able to be done for one man. Is it now possible to be done for anyone? Like others, I'd guess the first step is to record everything while you can.

</comment><comment><USER44> I wrote [https://trumped.com](https://trumped.com)

You ideally want five hours of clean speech (good microphone, no background noise, high sample rate). It should be spoken clearly, in a single tone or mood. My model sounds awful because the data isn't consistent, and the room tone and microphones are terrible.

If you want different prosody or moods, don't mix them in the same data set.

You can experiment with transfer learning LJSpeech with Nvidia Tacotron2 right now. Glow-tts is also promising.

You'll start to get results with fifteen minutes of sample data, but for high quality you want a lot of audio.

Have your wife read a book and record it. The training chunks will be ~10 seconds apiece, so keep that in mind for how to segment the audio.

Focus on getting lots of good sounding data. Hours. The models will improve, but this may be your only shot of acquiring the data.

Download the LJSpeech dataset and listen to it. See how it sounds, how it's separated. That is a fantastic dataset that has yielded tremendous results, and you can use it for inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER45> At a minimum get the following list of sentences recorded in her voice, [http://www.festvox.org/cmu_arctic/cmuarctic.data](http://www.festvox.org/cmu_arctic/cmuarctic.data)

Make sure the recordings are of a good quality. This will ensure that you will have a baseline TTS of her voice at the minimum.

</comment><comment><USER46> Here's a simple and practical solution:

Get a decent audio headset, have it record the audio to her phone, and spend hours talking to her about whatever. Preferably in a reasonably quiet environment.

Just spend a lot of time talking. You don't have to talk to her through a headset. Just make sure hers is recording her voice.

It would be easy, painless, and probably good for the relationship too.

</comment><comment><USER47> (off topic) Record a few things for her future self. E.g. favourite quotes, frequently used phrases.

<comment><USER48> Good advice! Maybe a few shoutouts to your future children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Make sure to record with the best microphone you can find and in the quietest room you can find. Makes a huge difference in the resulting TTS.

</comment><comment><USER50> You might look at resources for ALS patients.

Since ALS (aka Lou Gehrig's disease) is a degenerative motor neuron disease, people with ALS can pretty much count on eventually losing the ability to speak. So "voice banking" is apparently pretty common.

</comment><comment><USER51> Not exactly what you're asking for, but I wrote an app for this scenario:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.anaisbetts...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.anaisbetts.sirene)

This is a text-to-speech app with a very keen emphasis on _Day To Day_ usage - the UX will put the focus at the right places, help you reply faster, etc. I used it for a full month when I was unable to speak after voice surgery and it made a big difference, other folx have reported the same

</comment><comment><USER52> This is probably a really stupid suggestion but just in case.

Do you and your wife drink alcohol a bit? If so might it be worth having a couple of drinks in a quiet setting with her one evening with microphones running? I'm not suggesting getting wasted! I'm just wondering whether it might help to catch her getting more animated or "natural" in conversation. I was thinking this might help make the resulting synthesized speech capture even more of her personality than reading children's books or subsets of AI corpora etc.

</comment><comment><USER53> I have had good results with this. [https://www.resemble.ai/](https://www.resemble.ai/) It is based on this open source work. If you want to run it yourself. [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning)

The voice cloning can be done in a matter of minutes. (< an hour) Its also very easy to use the website.

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER54> Strongly suggest reaching out to Dr. Rupal Patel ([https://www.linkedin.com/in/rupalvocalid](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rupalvocalid)) of Northeastern University ([https://coe.northeastern.edu/people/patel- rupal/](https://coe.northeastern.edu/people/patel-rupal/)) and VocaliD ([https://vocalid.ai/about-us/](https://vocalid.ai/about-us/)). She's a licensed Speech-Language Pathologist ([https://web.northeastern.edu/cadlab/publications/RupalPatel_...](https://web.northeastern.edu/cadlab/publications/RupalPatel_CV_WEB.pdf)) and she and her husband, Dr. Deb Roy, did the Human Speechome project ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Speechome_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Speechome_Project)). She was also my doctoral advisor and I feel confident saying she would be very interested in talking with you.

</comment><comment><USER55> Do you have children? Perhaps - record her reading a few favorite children's books.

</comment><comment><USER56> Not to discourage you from making voice recordings and all that, but as someone who is handicapped and sometimes has trouble speaking because of it:

1\. I spend a lot of time online. It doesn't matter so much there. I do a lot of typing.

2\. My oldest son, who had serious output difficulties as a child, is talented at inferring what I need from a gesture and a grunt. This has proven enormously helpful.

3\. Consider using her phone as a communication device. It's small and people tend to take their phone everywhere and she can type out what she wants to say.

4\. Writing tweets can help a person learn to say things more succinctly. I do freelance writing and figuring out how to say things succinctly is a talent you can develop. (It's something I have to work at -- I'm a "would have written you a shorter letter if I had more time" type of person.) This can help enormously when you face communication barriers.

5\. Take some time to deal with the emotional stuff. It matters.

I'm sorry you are facing this. Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER57> ML will require a lot of samples for getting it as desired. I will say, let your wife carry an attached microphone and meet all the people she wishes to talk at least once. collect all the audio data, and you can use it later. <ake all the available moments memorable for her like If you have child record a message from your wife for next 10 birthday of child.

</comment><comment><USER58> Consider investing in a good microphone for recording. A Blue Yeti is ~$200.

</comment><comment><USER59> Here's a recent work [0] where you can train the model with 10s audio and convert any "text to speech" (all doable in the browser). I tried with Google Colab demo [1] and its performance fluctuates with the training audio sample that you give it so might need some trial and error to get the sweet spot.

Also the model is not saved in the browser with Colab so you might also want to do it locally to save it eventualy (if it comes to that).

All the best mate!

[0] Main repo: [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning) [1] Google colab repo to try it out: [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning/blob/ma...](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning/blob/master/demo_toolbox_collab.ipynb)

</comment><comment><USER60> Hi, I like your idea for your wife. Hope the surgery will succeed without damage to her speaking. I'm from Nvidia and know well the team behind NeMo toolkit. Happy to connect you to the team if that helps. You may send me an email to ardenwood.bruin_at_gmail.com. -- Michael

<comment><USER61> That's really good of you. It's amazing to see this community be so helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> This may also be useful. Free and open source.

[https://www.tobiidynavox.com/en-gb/software/web- applications...](https://www.tobiidynavox.com/en-gb/software/web- applications/message-banking-2/)

</comment><comment><USER63> The mycroft voice assistant has some tooling they used to create voices.

[https://mycroft.ai/blog/mimic-2-is-live/](https://mycroft.ai/blog/mimic-2-is- live/) [https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic2](https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic2)

Search Results Web results

Festival Speech Synthesis has a tool for recording speech databases, and some tutorials for training festival voices. [http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/research/projects/speechrecorder/](http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/research/projects/speechrecorder/)

</comment><comment><USER64> You need to do voice banking. It is imperative that you do so, so that your wife keeps her identity no matter what.

What you need to do is spend the entire next 3 weeks doing voice banking. This will give your wife a text-to-speech voice (SAPI 5 voice, or others, for example). You record phrases that the voice banking service wants you to speak, with a _high quality headset (best if wired) in a quiet setting_.

The more sentences (samples) you have, the better the voice will be, obviously. But, there are services out there that will update the recordings, as the technology gets better, and that is the way to go, in terms of choosing the "best service".

The voice banking services that people typically use are here: [https://www.mndassociation.org/professionals/management- of-m...](https://www.mndassociation.org/professionals/management-of-mnd/aac- for-mnd/voice-banking/equipment-and-services/)

I would say that Acapela my-own-voice is currently the best technology. Obviously there are open source technologies, but you do not have the luxury of time to figure all of that out. However, you should do your own voice banking for later post-processing on your own with open source stuff.

There is also a free version of voice banking available, but I would only recommend it as a secondary tool: [https://www.modeltalker.org/](https://www.modeltalker.org/)

This app (iOS and Android) for example, allows you to use your personal voice banked text-to-speech voice, to talk: [https://therapy- box.co.uk/predictable](https://therapy-box.co.uk/predictable)

This is another great app that allows you to use your personal voice banked text-to-speech voice: [https://www.assistiveware.com/products/proloquo4text](https://www.assistiveware.com/products/proloquo4text)

Source: Disabled engineering student, who is extremely interested in assistive technology. I would love to be a rehabilitation engineer.

</comment><comment><USER65> It might also be worth recording normal conversations you have around the house as a fallback. You can always cut it up later and feed it into these systems.

Best of luck to the two of you. I really hope you don't ever need this technology.

</comment><comment><USER66> You might want to try DIY'ing something like this [1] depending on the extensiveness of her surgery. It basically records electrical signals (EMG) emitted by the vocal chords (subvocalizations) and can convert it to text with ML/other signal processing algorithms. Basically a rudimentary version of the transhumanist Brain-Computer Interfaces that would enable telepathy.

[1] [https://dam- prod.media.mit.edu/x/2018/03/23/p43-kapur_BRjFwE...](https://dam- prod.media.mit.edu/x/2018/03/23/p43-kapur_BRjFwE6.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER67> This can be trained using only 5 Seconds of reference audio: [https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adapt...](https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adaptation/) [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.04558.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.04558.pdf)

It's been mentioned a bit already, but thought it was worth calling out. This may be one of the lowest-overhead ways to start experimenting, at least in terms of data collection.

</comment><comment><USER68> Your approach towards the situation might determine the life quality of you and your wife. I can't imagine how it's like to think in a logic way while you're in the middle of such of an emotional event.

</comment><comment><USER69> [https://dathudeptrai.github.io/TensorflowTTS/](https://dathudeptrai.github.io/TensorflowTTS/) is the state of the art and feels natural enough

</comment><comment><USER70> First off I'm sorry you're going through that, it sounds really tough. We sometimes have families use us for this ([https://trysaga.com](https://trysaga.com)) as a way to collect voice recordings of loved ones, to record and share a large number of memories and stories in their voice and have them saved forever. You can download all the recordings to keep. It's free right now and I'd be happy to help out and make sure it got you what you needed, let me know.

</comment><comment><USER71> Probably not what you were seeking, but I have to imagine it would be similar to long periods I have spent in a non-verbal state. Being allowed to exist and just smile or laugh as a "part" of the conversation around me was like sunlight on a dark day. The range of human emotion and expression often overlaps enormously between people. Sometimes pretending you're voice is really the good you hear around you and not the throat mumblings that cause so much conflict is the most beautiful dream.

<comment><USER71> Also... Learn sign language. Some of the most beautiful and overlooked people are non-verbal. I've met several truly speechless people who had families that never learned to sign. It's sad for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Sorry about this. Record as much voice as you can now (stereo too?), then you'll have time to find the right solution and improve it as the technology gets better in time

</comment><comment><USER73> Hope I am not repeating any comments here. My suggestion is that you start recording as soon as possible and as much as possible without worrying about technicalities. You can also use if you have any old voice records or videos with a relatively good voice quality. For now maybe she can read a book aloud in a silent room. After you have the data I can also help if you like to create a TTS model.

</comment><comment><USER74> You might contact the following company: [https://www.acapela- group.com/solutions/acapela-voice-factor...](https://www.acapela- group.com/solutions/acapela-voice-factory/)

There's also open source TTS from Mozilla: [https://github.com/mozilla/TTS](https://github.com/mozilla/TTS)

</comment><comment><USER75> I went through something similar with a parent years and years ago. I wanted to be able to do things to help with what would eventually be lost.

I have to say I didn't help as much as I thought I could and afterwards I was always wondering if I could have used this technology or that and done more.

So - I think you should recognize that you can only do so much, we're doing the best we can, and in the end we are all winging it.

</comment><comment><USER76> This is not open source but this was very good from their demo in terms of your own voice reproduction.

[https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai](https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai)

I hope good folks in there will help you, try reaching them.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VnFC-s2nOtI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VnFC-s2nOtI)

<comment><USER77> Love Descript and think it's a great way to both record and get transcripts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> I've recently seen these two software on HN that maybe of some help:

deepfake for voice: [https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice- Cloning](https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning)

Reproducing emotional voices: [https://www.sonantic.io/](https://www.sonantic.io/)

</comment><comment><USER79> Is this a time sensitive procedure? I think I'm stating the obvious - (maybe not) - but this is not something you should just wing a few weeks before, nor is it something you should try to figure out on your own without _thoroughly_ discussing with your wife. "Surprise honey, I deepfaked your voice!" is not something most people would appreciate.

</comment><comment><USER80> You are trying to do a beautiful thing. I don't have a knowledge of this subject, but I really wish you good luck on this project.

</comment><comment><USER81> Nobody has mentioned VocalID and voice surrogacy [1] yet. This organization might be able to recreate her voice from historic samples for speech-to-text

[1] [https://www.ted.com/talks/rupal_patel_synthetic_voices_as_un...](https://www.ted.com/talks/rupal_patel_synthetic_voices_as_unique_as_fingerprints)

</comment><comment><USER82> All sorts of feels here. I had a positive outcome from exploratory throat surgery that had a chance of obliterating my voice. Prepping the way you are doing is amazing. Please balance it with time well-spent with your wife, being present in the moment. Sounds trite and yet takes focus to not just concentrate in the possible negative future outcome.

</comment><comment><USER83> Here's a story from the San Francisco Chronicle on saving Stephen Hawking's voice: [https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon- Vall...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-Silicon-Valley-quest- to-preserve-Stephen-12759775.php)

</comment><comment><USER84> You might look at what Jamie Dupree has done.

[https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/15/health/dystonia-jamie- dupree-...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/15/health/dystonia-jamie-dupree-radio- no-voice/index.html)

He uses a text-to-speech system that sounds more-or-less like him.

</comment><comment><USER85> This is very much a short term solution if they are unable to talk immediately after surgery, for up to a few days. My wife used a small portable whiteboard and magic marker to write messages on in the same situation. It worked really well. Even with our 2 year old, it helped her to understand something unusual was going on.

</comment><comment><USER86> I'm sorry that the both of you have to deal with this. I've read many of the replies here and I'm surprised there isn't already a self-service website that does this. Pay some money, record some text, and boom here's your voice. Something like this should exist. Someone should build this.

</comment><comment><USER87> I don't really have anything to add to all the helpful comments under your thread. Do the preparation as much as you can, as long as your wife also wants this.

You said there is a small chance, so I really wish you and your wife the best of luck that she and her voice will be fine after the surgery.

</comment><comment><USER88> If she has time get here to read the most common english words. Then parse the text and play the audio for the known words and use traditional speech synthesis for the outliers. It will not be perfect but you can then possibly train an AI to pronounce the outliers.

</comment><comment><USER89> I would also think of various phrases that need a lot emotion applied. e.g. for sensitive situations like someone's death, or for positive feedback like a wedding or a birthday or a thank you

Maybe also if she has a favourite book or a favourite quote, get those recorded too.

Back it all up!

</comment><comment><USER90> If you don't have any children (yet) you should get her to record herself reading some of her favourite children's books. At the very least she will be able to read along with them. Children's books are quite sparse, so a page per-track is easy to do.

</comment><comment><USER91> Just let her read a couple of pieces of texts and record in high-quality (44 KHz).

Beyond the techical answer, you may want her to record some nice personal words addressed to your family that you can listen to later.

You don't need to do anything until the worst case materialises.

</comment><comment><USER92> For recording training audio:

[https://github.com/daanzu/speech-training- recorder](https://github.com/daanzu/speech-training-recorder)

The recorder works with Python 3.6.10. Need to pip install webrtcvad also.

</comment><comment><USER93> There is [https://www.descript.com/lyrebird- ai](https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai) which is in private beta right now, but looks to serve your needs exactly. Maybe reach out to them?

</comment><comment><USER94> Confident as I may be that OPs intentions are good and pure, a quick CTRL-F on the comment threads finds no references to "abuse" or "ethics", and I propose that synthesis of voice raises issues for which society has few natural defenses.

</comment><comment><USER95> Roger Ebert has some articles about his troubles he encountered that may be worth a read.

</comment><comment><USER96> [https://www.modeltalker.org/vrec/](https://www.modeltalker.org/vrec/) is a project for "voice banking" that might be able to help. It's not perfect yet.

</comment><comment><USER97> Good luck with what you are doing and more importantly, I wish your wife good health.

</comment><comment><USER98> My first thought was to spend some time together not speaking. See how it goes, so there's less fear going into it. Maybe take a couples mime class or something! Just making it real and not living in fear is the point.

</comment><comment><USER99> IDK about the tech, but I would not worry about it right now. You dont need to play with the tech unless the bad unlikely outcome comes to pass.

The only tip I have is from a bit of amateur sound editing I did: collect many samples, and beware of big phrases: Like, ask her to say the same thing many times. And ... sometimes ... to ... stop ... at ... each ... word. And ... so ... me ... ti ... mes at each syllable.

Otherwise, if you ever need to create a sample that contains a single word/syllable, you cant. It is weird how much sound that contains clearly distinguishable syllables for the human ears still is not separable when you go to edit it.

Also, you might want to check wordlists by frequency to get a menu of common words, and ipa notation, to ensure you cover a good range of sounds

<comment><USER100> > Otherwise, if you ever need to create a sample that contains a single > word/syllable, you cant. It is weird how much sound that contains clearly > distinguishable syllables for the human ears still is not separable when you > go to edit it.

Don't know why you're being downvoted. Thought it was insightful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Please do keep us posted on the final outcome. We all pray for the surgery to go successful. ( Really appreciate your efforts for preparing for the worst case scenario)

</comment><comment><USER102> I recently learned about a startup that is working on this kind of tech: [https://phonetic.ai/](https://phonetic.ai/)

</comment><comment><USER103> These are the things i am coming always back to ycombinator.com. There are always valuable, intelligent replies here for all kind of issues you might have.

</comment><comment><USER104> Take a look at Lyrebird

[https://www.descript.com/lyrebird- ai?source=lyrebird](https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai?source=lyrebird)

</comment><comment><USER105> Vocalid.ai has an vocal bank where you can record yourself, and use other people's voices as well. It could be a good choice for her to use her own voice

</comment><comment><USER106> what dangers are there of someone 'stealing' your voice to impersonate you later? it seems mostly theoretical right now, but perhaps the more high- profile you are, the bigger the dangers might be, even today? if you had a large body of your voice already recorded (prepped for voice processing systems), is that data high-risk?

</comment><comment><USER107> Make sure to not have her read too much. The vocal cords can get inflamed and increase the chance of complications/damage.

</comment><comment><USER108> There's an app for that! It's called Vocable, it's open source and iOS and Android!!!

</comment><comment><USER109> Please let us know the good news if they arrive, preferable with Tell HN or something similar.

Good luck and best wishes! <3

</comment><comment><USER110> get a great microphone and have her read her favorite books. Go for books with lots of dialog and emotional content.

Later, you can extract all the phonemes you want from it and you will retain the emotional expressiveness of her voice.

She should probably sing some songs -- lullabies, rock, etc. Go for emotional diversity.

</comment><comment><USER111> > I'd like to prepare, just in case, to have technology to reproduce her voice > from keyboard or other input.

Is this something that she wants? She's got a lot on her plate (emotionally and logistically) to prepare for this surgery, and maybe doesn't need a big geek project inflicted upon her just because there's a small chance of a bad outcome.

</comment><comment><USER112> How small of a chance of her losing her ability to speak are you talking about here?

</comment><comment><USER113> Learn sign language.

<comment><USER114> These suggestions are getting downvoted, but my girlfriend needed surgery wherein she wouldn't be able to speak for about a month. I know sign language, and tutored her for about a month leading up to the surgery. It was empowering, and she was able to teach friends, family and coworkers a few basic signs which made a lot of interactions go smoother. This low-tech solution doesn't need batteries or internet connectivity, and can provide a much smoother flow of conversation than typing things out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> Acapela.com has a voice banking service

</comment><comment><USER116> Please. There is a small chance you said. Everything will be fine. But still carry on your research on the problem since it might help others.

<comment><USER117> even if there is a small chance, the preparation may help lesson the blow of what would still be a tremendous loss.

also it might just help pass the time since OP has 3 weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> Descript.com has the tech.

Reach out to Andrew Mason.

</comment><comment><USER119> Not bad for as a niche product Idea

</comment><comment><USER120> Does your wife want you to do this?

</comment><comment><USER118> Descript.com Andrew Mason

</comment><comment><USER121> Did you ask her about that? Make sure she is not freaking out of that.</comment>


Face.com acquired by Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://face.com/blog/facebook-acquires-face-com/

<comment><USER2> This marks the beginning of a new era of facial recognition in social media, which is essentially a labour saving innovation so that you won't have to spend all that time tagging your facebook photos.

Instead, you'll spend all that time untagging them.

<comment><USER3> I recently discovered that Facebook had decided to remove my 'must approve when I am tagged' - nothing incriminating, just reminders of their abuse.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you. But I think the majority of fb users would disagree.

<comment><USER5> Why do you say that? It seems like a generally unwanted feature. At most I'd think most fb users won't notice or care.

<comment><USER6> If it's true, a notification would have been nice. Or changing the setting back only for people who haven't specifically looked at and increased their privacy settings in the past

<comment><USER3> But then they'd be directly acknowledging the abuse, and then you could quickly change it back - however they want pictures to be tagged of you and to become public so they can be shared to everyone who they think will engage / comment on them, etc..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Watch out, Book.com - you're next.

<comment><USER8> hah, of course Book.com is owned by B&N. Can't wait for a FaceNook tablet.

<comment><USER9> Well, FaceBook _is_ trying to develop a FB phone...so the FaceNook isn't as crazy as it may sound.

<comment><USER10> Pretty sure this is how Skynet got started.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From the title I thought they were just after the domain name! Seems they have picked up some pretty cool face recognising kit.

</comment><comment><USER12> In a local geeks gathering a few months ago with Yossi Vardi and some Facebook executive[1], Yossi asked the executive "Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Redhat, Motorola, IBM, Yahoo, Intel, Philips, [.. more international tech companies ...], which one is the exception?", alluding to all of those companies excluding Facebook having R&D in Israel. As a local, happy to see them joining the list.

[1] Actually David Fischer, son of Bank of Israel governor Stanley Fischer

<comment><USER13> Facebook doesn't have R&D anywhere, not even in the US

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I suspect Facebook has bigger plans for Face.com's technology than auto- tagging. I bet they integrate facial recognition technology into the Facebook Platform.

Tagging every face... everywhere... and sending that data back to Facebook. That could be monumental.

<comment><USER15> Monumental or invasive? I personally fear for the latter.

<comment><USER16> Given the reactions to Facebook's past privacy debacles I would be surprised if they didn't allow people to opt out.

<comment><USER17> The problem is this: What if I don't have an account, but somebody still happens to tag my face with my name, for whatever reason?

I know that this is mostly about facebook users, but seeing how much facebook spam I get trying to incite me to join in, I could totally see them go this route - Encourage people to tag friends who aren't on facebook and thus give those friends no other choice but to claim their identity.

<comment><USER16> I'm only talking about faces tagged with an actual Facebook account.

It's unlikely they would enable facial recognition for non-Facebook users. How will they know the difference between two different people tagged as "John Doe" if they're not linked to a specific account?

<comment><USER18> By their faces! Also gender, location, preferences, web pages visited (they still track your browser even if you don't have a profile), and by the networks of people who talk about them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been wondering if Facebook will do general object and/or product detection in photos to help them match highly targeted adverts to the content (and location, season, etc.) of a photo.

</comment><comment><USER20> facebook really seems to be intent on becoming the world's largest photo- sharing site.

the question is: are they planning to transform that from "omg check out these crazy party pics" into "everything is photographed and we've identified everyone involved" variety?

it seems to me that the implications of this line of progress are incomprehensibly far-reaching...

</comment><comment><USER15> I remember Facebook recently implemented their controversial Face detecting module. Privacy advocates were freaked out because Facebook was trying to automatically tag people in photos simply based on face recognition.

I assume they're going to be moving forward in that regard by acquiring Face.com's tech.

<comment><USER21> Facebook have been using face.com for face detection and recognition for a while. I guess they were happy enough with the results that they wanted control of the technology (and/or to stop others from using it)

<comment><USER22> Could it be that the license to process the volume facebook has in mind is near or higher than the price of the company? I don't know the price model for the face API but it's not unreasonable to consider a tipping point.

<comment><USER21> Probably not. It's so far been a symbiotic relation - face.com needed facebook as much as facebook needed face.com.

Facebook is probably making sure that this symbiotic relation is not going to be threatened by a competitor buying face.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Shameless plug here: <http://search.labs.face.com> \- a site we developed for face.com lets you scan for faces all your Facebook photos and do some interesting searches on them, like "smiling child, female with glasses" etc.

<comment><USER3> So I'm guessing the whole face.com acquisition was to increase awareness of context of photos?

<comment><USER24> yup, this is my guess. it's all about understanding users more deeply. hypertargeted ads. what's in a photo these days? location + time. along with captions and photo titles, FB can infer what you were doing, where you were doing it, and when. but many photos go untagged because it's a pain to tag everyone. face.com solves this problem, connecting a person to all the valuable ad data in each photo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Facebook already used the Face.com API extensively. Rumors about this circulated here (Israel) this past month. This is great news.

</comment><comment><USER26> $80-100m is far far too cheap. I think face.com made a poor decision here. Facebook will now be able to develop a system that will be able to recognize faces in any future or past photos (obviously including the 100s of billions they already have) and to link that face to a name and a bunch of demographic data. 3-5 years down the line, this ability will be incredibly powerful (think Minority Report, HUD overlays etc).

</comment><comment><USER27> This is more vague than "support our service":

> We love you guys, and the plan is to continue to support our developer > community. If there are new developments you can expect to hear from us > here, on the developer blog, and through our developer newsletter.

I think the vague wording is probably intentional. It doesn't seem like the sort of service that facebook would be into providing directly to developers.

</comment><comment><USER28> face.com -- all I can think of when I see this is "how much did they pay for that domain name???"

It must have been in the 10's of thousands of dollars. How that can be a good use of startup resources is a complete mystery to me...

<comment><USER29> facebook still considered a startup?

<comment><USER28> I meant the company that was bought. "face.com"

I wasn't saying facebook just bought it for the domain name. I was saying face.com, as a startup, at some point bought that the domain name "face.com" despite having little to no revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Let the Facebook acquisition-as-innovation begin!

<comment><USER31> "Acquivation?"

<comment><USER18> Innoquisition?

<comment><USER31> It's a tough combo for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yet another reason to not use Facebook.

<comment><USER33> Yeah. Can't wait for my facebook using mates to make my shadow profile more accurate.

<comment><USER34> This could revolutionize the Facebook signup process. Instead of entering all that pesky personal information, just snap a pic with your webcam. They already know all that info!

<comment><USER35> You joke, but the early signup process for Google App Engine was just your Gmail password, then they told you if you were accepted into the beta programme or not. They already read all your mail, they know if they wanted you in or not...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "Drop the book. Just Face. It's cleaner."

But seriously, facial recognition is a useful feature to save folks time trying to tag people with names in every photo. Also helps with discovering new people you want to meet. And yes of course it could be used for "evil" both by Facebook and the government. But that's true of any other technology, so arguably a wash.

</comment><comment><USER37> Wow, I assumed that Face.com _was_ a part of Facebook.com...their look and feel seemed like a front-facing spinoff of FB, to get developers more interested in the technology. Their API has been very generous and useful for all sorts of projects, but I'm sure this is going to freak privacy advocates even more...frankly, the connections/derivations FB could make with face recognition will not be any more comprehensive than what they can already do with the interaction data they already have.

<comment><USER38> Facebook has already been using facial recognition for some time. If anything it will just increase the success rate of their current approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> An interesting phenomenon may come when unintentional photo bombs identify either celebrities or wanted criminals.

</comment><comment><USER40> So the next hot facebook app will be a photo tool to make your face unrecognizable by facial recognition software.

</comment><comment><USER41> "Business owners and investors use systems, rather than their time, to generate income." --Robert Kiyosaki

</comment><comment><USER42> They'd better need some gTLDs like .face or even .palm (unfortunately .book already has 9 pretenders).

</comment><comment><USER43> Looks more like Facebook bought the company for the domain name. What's next? book.com?

</comment><comment><USER44> Interesting. I didn't realize they were based out of Tel Aviv.

</comment><comment><USER45> Get ready, <http://book.com>, you're next!

</comment><comment><USER46> Just waiting for Facebook to announce their purchase of skynet.com now and then Facebook should have the market well and truly cornered.

</comment><comment><USER47> Probably just for the domain.

<comment><USER15> This is incorrect. Read the entire post and realize that Facebook has been using Face.com's tech for facial tagging already.

<comment><USER48> Though honestly, the domain is valuable too. Lots of people probably type in "face" expecting it to autocomplete, and it doesn't always.

<comment><USER49> Sure, but anyone who does that is already a Facebook user.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How cabinet rentals could save the flagging arcade game market - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/how-cabinet-rentals-could-save-the-flagging-arcade-game-market/

<comment><USER2> The market is flagging because cabinet manufacturers don't innovate. For the last decade (or more) I've kept wandering into arcades and being perplexed about why they offer _less_ than what I can enjoy at home with an average- power computer, an ordinary game console, and a moderate-size TV. The only thing differen tin arcade is a heavy-duty controller, the games themselves are tame in the extreme.

I know it costs a fortune to develop a game. But why not install super-juiced PCs and ultra-high-res monitors or ultra-large screens, of the sort that I couldn't afford or fit at home? I remember playing a Sega R-360 which came out in _1990_ : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVbmoF9Ehuk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVbmoF9Ehuk)

Good luck finding anything this cool in a US arcade nowadays. I would cheerfully pay $5 for a few minutes in one of these with an up-to-date space/flight game. I don't want a nostalgia trip playing some 30 year old console (well, OK, _sometimes_ ), what I want is a new experience that I can't have at home, but manufacturers don't seem interested in offering that.</comment>


Clearview AI's Entire Source Code Exposed in Security Error - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/clearview-ais-entire-source-code-exposed-in-security-error?ref=home <comment><USER2> More discussion here:

Security lapse exposed Clearview AI source code - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22892494](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22892494)

Also links to the full article on Tech Crunch.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Although the repository was protected with a password, a misconfigured > setting allowed anyone to register as a new user to log in to the system > storing the code.</comment>


ScienceNews.org: Superglass could be new state of matter - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/39242/title/Superglass_could_be_new_state_of_matter_

<comment><USER2> "at temperatures close to absolute zero, or -273º Celsius."

Weird things are bound to happen when you remove all kinetic energy from a system.

</comment><comment><USER3> Glass at normal temperature flows, but incredibly slowly, you can see from old window glass which is thin at the top and thicker at the bottom.

<comment><USER4> _Glass at normal temperature flows, but incredibly slowly, you can see from old window glass which is thin at the top and thicker at the bottom._

.

Urban legend. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#Behavior_of_antique_glass>

_The observation that old windows are often thicker at the bottom than at the top is often offered as supporting evidence for the view that glass flows over a matter of centuries. It is then assumed that the glass was once uniform, but has flowed to its new shape, which is a property of liquid. ... When actually installed in a window frame, the glass would be placed thicker side down both for the sake of stability and to prevent water accumulating in the lead cames at the bottom of the window. Occasionally such glass has been found thinner side down or thicker on either side of the window's edge, as would be caused by carelessness at the time of installation._

<comment><USER5> Wow. I'm usually pretty keen on the current "urban myths" and was completely unaware of this one. Thanks for the information.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I learn Python 3 or Python 2? - <AUTHOR> I plan to explore data science and machine learning. After looking into some MOOCs and other online learning resources I have come to the conclusion that a firm grasp of Python is essential. I am new to Python, so my question is should I learn Python 2 or Python 3?<p>Edit: Corrected a typo. <comment><USER2> Python 3 for sure. Even if some major libraries are not yet supported is just a matter of time for them to be 3 compatible. And on top of that, you get a lot of goodies in python 3 specially around string manipulation and dictionaries. Take a look at this [0] post from the python community about python 3 vs 2.

0\. [https://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3](https://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3)

</comment><comment><USER3> Learn? 3, but really both - apart from string encoding, there are almost only small syntax differences. Nothing that would make you go "I don't know what it does, I don't know python 2".

Use? 3 if possible, unless some super important library is not updated. 2 is going away at some point. Let it die.

</comment><comment><USER4> There aren't any differences important enough to worry about at the "I am learning Python" level. Down the road, problems between one and the other will get resolved by Googling into StackOverflow, blogs, and the Python documentation. Googling to resolve problems is part of learning Python...and every other programming language these days. Hence Googling for answers is part of learning to program.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER5> 3\. All the libraries we all know and love are moving there, even Guido the Python BDFL killed 2.7 off himself[0] with a definitive EOL date of 01/01/2020\. Learn 3.

[0] [https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2018-March/1523...](https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2018-March/152348.html)</comment>