Adobe Project VoCo: Soon we may be able to make them people to say things they never said. How; Adobe is planning to release a new voice editing software.
The company presented Project VoCo yesterday at its annual MAX event, unveiling a tool that will do for the sound what Photoshop does for image editing.
VOCO can be used to introducetreatment new words that the speaker has never said and create completely new, and natural, big-mouthed phrases.
The technology was presented by researcher Zeyu Jin, who wowed attendees at the MAX event with cutting-edge products still in development. We don't know if VOCO will eventually be released as a product. Currently the Adobe team Research works with University of Princeton for the project.
"We've developed a technology called Project VOCO that allows you to simply type the word or words you want to change or enter into VoiceOver. The algorithm will do the rest and make it sound like the original speaker said it, "Adobe told TheVerge.
The new software is designed to help content creators in editing a dialogue or narrative, debugging, or even changing a speech.
Despite its predicted success if it is finally released, from that point on it will be very difficult to trust someone's speech recording again. On the other hand, it could open up a whole new way of preserving one's voice or using voices in other technologies.
Adobe told TechCrunch that Project VOCO is an example of "voice conversion" rather than speech synthesis.
Jin and Princeton researcher Adam Finkelstein who worked with the Adobe Research team said:
"The goal of the voice converter (VC) is to modify a recording that contains the voice of one speaker, so that it sounds like another speaker, without altering the content of the speech."
Let's say both Google and Microsoft are trying to improve voice conversion technology using other techniques.
Watch the presentation video:
