
Show HN: Borg Voice Generator - dsteinman
https://jaxcore.github.io/jaxcore-say/borg-example/
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agucova
I've always wondered if there is something like this for the voice of Majel
Barrett-Roddenberry (Computer). I know her voice was recorder phonetically
before she died ([https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-voice-of-star-treks-computers-
co...](https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-voice-of-star-treks-computers-could-be-
coming-to-bo-1786251988)), but I don't think there's public access to that.

Perhaps transfer learning could be used to copy the style, using something
like SV2TTS.

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dsteinman
As far as I know they have not released those phonetic recordings. But even
without those recordings it might be possible to use those deepfake voice
fingerprinting systems to build an STT engine from sound clips from the show.

~~~
makerofspoons
IIRC there are a lot of sound clips voiced by her on the Star Trek
Encyclopedia CD:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Trek_Encyclopedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Trek_Encyclopedia)

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UI_at_80x24
Very cool effort, but I think it sounds more like Daleks from Dr. Who.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQLbwOGT8eM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQLbwOGT8eM)

~~~
nerfhammer
Incidentally the Dalek voice is an effect that can be accomplished really
cheaply in hardware or software, called a ring modulator:

[https://webaudio.prototyping.bbc.co.uk/ring-
modulator/](https://webaudio.prototyping.bbc.co.uk/ring-modulator/)

~~~
davidw
Dr Who used cheap special effects?! Say it ain't so!

I loved the Tom Baker version as a kid.

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nulbyte
Fun project, I'm sure, but sounds nothing like the Borg I remember.

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Gys
I agree, this is how I remember it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyenRCJ_4Ww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyenRCJ_4Ww)

~~~
UI_at_80x24
Same here. It's obvious from the other clip provided that the voice evolved
over time; but it's not something I noticed at the time. The voice you linked
to is the one that is most memorable to me.

~~~
mathgeek
> It's obvious from the other clip provided that the voice evolved over time

I'd be surprised if this wasn't intentional, based on the premise.

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devbas
It doesn't work for me in Safari on Mac

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greggman2
Safari has all kinds of issues with audio. Every report just leads to a rdar:
url and then silence, both from Apple and from Safari haha (cry)

For a while couldn't send streamed but redirected audio through the webaudio
api on Safari only. Workaround was to manually catch the redirect but the
latest safari that doesn't help.

Like WebGL I don't think Apple wants Web Audio to work. They've got several
outstanding bugs in WebGL (3yrs+) and their non-existent WebGL2 support as not
seen a single commit in > 3yrs. Web Audio appears to be the same. It's
frustrating.

~~~
tinus_hn
They do have their own Apple Music streaming platform, perhaps you can just do
what they do

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greggman2
This is cool but I'm curious why it sounds so much worse than the built in
speech to text API

[http://greggman.github.io/fanfictionreader/](http://greggman.github.io/fanfictionreader/)

Which voices are available are browser and OS dependent and there's no "borg"
voice anymore. There used to be several alien and or non human voices but
Apple removed them from the OS and most browsers just call the OS's text to
speech API

\--correction--

You need to go into the VoiceOver Utilities and add all the novalaty voices
back in

[https://recordit.co/ZGgw9MhepW](https://recordit.co/ZGgw9MhepW)

~~~
dsteinman
This wasn't made with the window.speechSynthesis API, it's using 2 older
systems (espeak and sam) that have been ported to JavaScript. They don't sound
as good but they generate AudioContext data which can be processed, mixed, and
visualized in the browser. I don't think it wouldn't be possible to make this
kind of Borg voice using the speechSynthesis API -- I did it by generating the
speech using 6 voices, 3 in each channel.

I totally agree the built-in OS speech systems sound better over and I may end
up adding window.speechSynthesis support to the API I made so it'll expose
more voice profiles, but those ones will lack the visualization ability.

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degenerate
Can this be modified to include the original voices from the 1998 _Microsoft
Sam TTS Generator_ , or is that voice technology not open-source?

ex: [https://tetyys.com/SAPI4/](https://tetyys.com/SAPI4/)

~~~
dsteinman
I like the way that one sounds. But it looks like it's using a server-side
script to generate the audio:

view-
source:[https://tetyys.com/SAPI4/scripts/tts.js](https://tetyys.com/SAPI4/scripts/tts.js)

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durpleDrank
It would be fun if you could generate a link with a hash of a message so you
can send it to your friends and coworkers with a silly message that autoplays.

~~~
dsteinman
It already does this, when you click the "say" button it generates a base64
url. You can share that url. The problem is when someone loads the URL the
browser will not autoplay the clip. You have to click a button (or some other
user interaction) to start the Web Audio API, it's a really annoying
limitation that I wish Firefox and Chrome would change to a one-time popup
confirmation. So what I did was hide the text box until after playing the
audio.

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m4r35n357
scary!

