"Audio avatars" will allow you to change the voice in video games. Try it yourself

Computer games released in the last fewyears, provide ample opportunity for careful customization of characters. Each player can create unique faces and try on any clothes so that his virtual avatar is fully consistent with his style. The only thing that is currently unavailable for video game lovers is a change in their own voice, but this restriction will soon be removed. It is expected that Modulate technology will be built into the games and services of communication, changing the tone of the voice beyond recognition. You can try it now.

The authors of the technology are Mike Pappas and CarterHuffman The idea of ​​creating a technology for changing the voice came to them in 2015, when Huffman used the Prisma application to give the photos the style of famous paintings. He quickly realized that such processing could be done with audio, and after a year of conducting experiments with a generative-adversarial neural network, he obtained the first results.

This is what people have wanted for hundreds of years. Technology has been mentioned in science fiction and games, and this is what we need to develop.

Mike Pappas, co-founder of Modulate

To change a male voice to a female orto give him the voice of Darth Vader or other characters, one part of the Modulate neural network creates an example of a voice, and the second one assesses whether its tone and other features meet the established requirements. If it has the wrong height or another characteristic, the neural network creates options until a decent result appears.

Authors worry that technology willsubjected to harsh criticism, as it can be used by attackers to deceive people. Because of this, it was decided that it would not be delivered as a standalone application, but would become part of online games - there is hope that this approach will not allow using the technology for fraudulent purposes.

</ p>

Modulate can greatly diversifymultiplayer games - users can not only change the appearance of the characters, but also their own voice in the chat in real time. Since technology reacts not to words, but to the tone of voice, it will be available in any language of the world. The authors hope that in the process of learning the neural network will learn to recognize laughter and even change the accent.

You can try the technology on its officialsite. To do this, you need to record a 10-second fragment of your own voice, change its tone with the help of sliders and click “Apply”. You can hear the changed voice by clicking on the play button.

Do you like modulate technology? Would you rather use it in games? Which ones? Feel free to write your answers in the comments, and you can always discuss the topic in our Telegram chat.