New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English

Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English
5 by Gcarter08 | 1 comments on Hacker News.
Hey HN, I’m open sourcing my Hurston-1 narrowband TTS model (Apache-2.0). It is very good with American English and does especially well with Southern American and Regional African English accents. Destined AI is based in Atlanta, and I built this because I’m amazed by what AI can do, and I wanted to help introduce and welcome more people to feel comfortable using and interacting with AI. Since 2021, I’ve been collecting fully consented voice data from over 20,000 people, 1M audio recordings, and over 1,800 hrs of audio captured to date. For this model, I used a small part of the data, 136 hrs, to finetune Maya1 and expand it’s capabilities. Hurston-1 is a narrowband TTS model that focuses the output on telephone use because that is still where most of these voices will be heard. I’ve used it to support customers such as Amazon and Salesforce and generated over half-mill revenue with it. Now I’m open sourcing it to help unlock opportunities for others as well. Limitations: this model doesn’t maintain the exact same voice across prompts and doesn’t support voice cloning. For many use cases, this is fine but maybe not so - if you’re creating podcasts. This is the first release - I’m already working on the next version with improvements. I would appreciate, if anyone is interested in this space, download the model from huggingface, check it out and let me know any feedback. Also, open to connecting with others in this space as well.

New top story on Hacker News: Why is AI generated language so hard to understand?

Why is AI generated language so hard to understand?
6 by canjobear | 4 comments on Hacker News.

New top story on Hacker News: Reforming English Spelling

Reforming English Spelling
10 by jruohonen | 10 comments on Hacker News.

New top story on Hacker News: Animations for System Builders

Animations for System Builders
9 by KraftyOne | 1 comments on Hacker News.

New top story on Hacker News: Mini brain organoids 'reading' Braille key step towards biohybrid computing

Mini brain organoids 'reading' Braille key step towards biohybrid computing
15 by CharlesW | 4 comments on Hacker News.

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: I told people I'm a convicted felon after 20 years of hiding it

Show HN: I told people I'm a convicted felon after 20 years of hiding it
12 by buf | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi there. I was engineer number 3 at Eventbrite and founding engineer at Reforge. I've created a dozen or so startups myself and have worked in many others, like Instacart. All this time, no one knew that I was a convicted felon. It wasn't exactly a topic that came up, but it was certainly something that I never brought up. When you're a convicted felon, people look at you as if you are tainted. I was unable to rent apartments in San Francisco. I was unable to get a job directly after being released from prison. It's funny because when you owe the state $17,000 in restitution and you can't get a job, people become extremely desperate. And that desperation can easily put you right back into prison. So I went from homeless person at age 19 to 7-figures about 10 years later. I retired at age 38. What I'm doing now is writing an autobiography. The main theme of it is hope. And I want to make sure that people know about it. They don't necessarily have to be interested in it, but if people know about what it's like sleeping in a car believing that one day you will travel the world and then actually doing it, then I think I've accomplished my task in writing this book. If you're interested, please let me know.

New top story on Hacker News: Show HN: RawLink – Building a VPN protocol from scratch

Show HN: RawLink – Building a VPN protocol from scratch
10 by znano | 0 comments on Hacker News.
https://zola.ink/blog/posts/rawlink-building-a-vpn-protocol-...