Show HN: Borg Voice Generator (opens in new tab)

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/

There are a handful of Dalek effects for the Teensy/Teensy Audio platform:

- https://pastebin.com/dYf49wp5 (from this demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TyN__5MuJs)

- https://forum.pjrc.com/threads/47157-Distort-Voice-to-Someth...

Teensy info is here: https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

Teensy audio board is here: https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy3_audio.html (heads up, there's a rev D board to use with the Teensy 4, has the same functionality but different pinouts to match the Teensy 4).

I have a friend who is very handy, very into building vintage stuff. Cars, bikes, etc. One day he rang on some unrelated subject, I could hear he was on the motorway, I asked him where he was going.

"Oh I'm just off to get a voice box for my dalek". Like that's the most normal thing in the world.

Sure enough, next time I visited, a certain iconic malevolent alien, that fears only stairs, was sitting in the corner of the garage, happily murderously chuntering away every time he pressed the button.

Reminded me of the Vogans from the original radio show of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But that might just be my memory playing tricks.

Agreed, the Borg voices are much deeper and certainly aren't don't have a British accent.

This is very spot on, especially if you use some standard Dalek lines. A good example to test: "The Doctor is detected: terminate, terminate! Seek, locate, destroy."

I always liked the Borg voice in Voyager. It had the reverberating "many voices" feel, e.g. in https://youtu.be/4bkw69E_C4g

You be the judge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxImROvCnj8&feature=youtu.be...

https://jaxcore.github.io/jaxcore-say/borg-example/?say=d2Ug...

Makes it more interesting, in a way - who knew there was an uncanny valley between humans trying sound cybernetic and software trying to sound like humans trying to sound cybernetic.

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

Aye, it sounds like the Borg assimilated the late Prof Hawking's speech synthesizser.

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.

I've been looking into that too.

Where I'm at now: there's an audio book she recorded, which is on the edge of being a large enough corpus for a third party to generate a model. I haven't listened to it yet though, so I don't know of it's in the right flat intonation to be easily usable.

I'd like to have something like this for the HAL 9000 voice. Does anybody have any suggestions?

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.

I've had trouble identifying why. Safari has a largely compatible AudioContext API, and there's no errors, but the audio never starts playing and there's no "onended" event when it's supposed to be done. So I'm a bit stumped at the moment.

Same for Safari on iPhone

Same for me (safari on iOS)

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.

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

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.