SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov 28, 2023--

Dominic West's wife Catherine FitzGerald described their relationship as a 'wonderful love affair'

Omegle, a video chat service that connects users with strangers at random, is shutting down after 14 years following ample misuse of the platform — particularly the sexual abuse of minors

By Andrew Chung and John Kruzel WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, under scrutiny over revelations that

Meta has created a new system that it says can generate convincing speech in a variety of styles – but will not release it for fear of the risks. The new tool is called “Voicebox” and can be set to create outputs in different styles, new voices from scratch as well as with a sample. It makes speech across six languages, as well as a variety of other tools such as noise removal. It says that it is a major development on previous speech systems that required specific training for each task. Instead, Voicebox can just be given raw audio and a transcription, and then be used to modify an audio sample. It is far more effective than its competitors, Meta claimed in its announcement. It can generate words with a 5.9 per cent error rate compared to 1.9 per cent from competitor Vall-E, for instance, and do so as much as 20 times more quickly. Meta said that it had been built on the foundation of a new model it called “Flow Matching”. That allows the system to learn from speech that has not been carefully labelled, so that it can be trained on more and more diverse data. Voicebox was trained on 50,000 hours of speech and transcripts that came from public domain audiobooks in English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, and Portuguese, Meta said. Now that it has been trained, it can be given an audio recording and fill in the speech from the context, Meta said. That could be used to create a realistic sounding voice from just two seconds of speech, for instance, potentially being used to bring voices to people who cannot speak or to add people’s voices into games. It could also be used to translate a passage of speech from one lanagueg to another in a way that keeps the style, Meta said, allowing people to talk to each other authentically even if they don’t speak the same language. It could also be useful in more technical scenarios, such as audio editing, where it can be used to replace words that were not properly recorded, for instance. But Meta said that the risks were such that it would not be releasing the model. It did not point to specific harms, but said that “as with other powerful new AI innovations, we recognize that this technology brings the potential for misuse and unintended harm”. Numerous reports have warned that such systems could be used to copy people’s voices without their consent and in ways that could be harmful, such as creating fake videos of news events or using people’s voices to pose as them during scam calls, for instance. “There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time,” Meta said in a statement. “While we believe it is important to be open with the AI community and to share our research to advance the state of the art in AI, it’s also necessary to strike the right balance between openness with responsibility.” It also pointed to a separate paper, published on its website, in which it detailed how it had built a “highly effective” system that can distinguish between authentic speech and audio that had been generated with Voicebox. Read More Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good Meta scrambles to fix Instagram algorithm connecting ‘vast paedophile network’ Reddit user’s protests against the site’s rules have taken an even more bizarre turn

Rio Ferdinand has been playing into his ongoing 'rivalry' with Jamie Carragher, after snubbing him when they ran into each other at Manchester City and Real Madrid's second game. It comes after Carragher labelled the former centre-back a 'clown' last week for disagreeing on a penalty decision. As Ferdinand greeted the other pundits, he took one look at Carragher and walked straight past, capturing the entire thing on camera, sending his rival bright red. 'Why the red face??', he later joked alongside the clip on social media. Click here to sign up for our newsletters

Drake performs alongside the hologram version of his younger self during a concert in Chicago

Evan was diagnosed with epilepsy when he was only 2 and half years but he overcame all that to become a successful video editor and YouTuber

Twitter, the text-based social media platform that played an outsized role on society by serving as a digital town square, was killed by its unhinged owner Elon Musk on Sunday. It was 17 years old.

Sydney Sweeney revealed she had to 'fight' for her roles in 'Reality' and 'The White Lotus' after being typecast as Cassie Howard of 'Euphoria'

The president of the Spanish government's High Council of Sport (CSD) says he will take action against Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) president Luis Rubiales if the soccer body fails to do do so.

By William Schomberg LONDON (Reuters) -British consumers picked up the pace of their spending last month and sales volumes over