U.S. Air Force keen to get Voice Transformation Technology
All you Terminator fans out there would be quite familiar with voice transformation technology. You would have noticed the terminator imitating someone's voice perfectly.
Leave aside Sci-Fi, the U.S. Air Force is keen to get such a technology in reality. Technologies that can help its pilots change their voices and sound like another person altogether.
Such a technology is not that difficult to build as it sounds and can be accomplished with some sound transformation algorithms.
The original requirements from the U.S.A.F. solicitation are:
The goal of this phase is to research techniques to analyze a person [sic] voice for voice transformation. While voice transformation have [sic] been around for awhile, the ability [sic] to transform a person's voice to a target voice is not yet solved. Parameters such as the speaking rate, stress, and intonation will provide broad parameters for modeling a person's voice. A finer grain analysis of a person's voice may also be performed by de-convolving an audio signal into its glottal pulse and vocal tract information.
Transforming a speaker's voice to make it unidentifiable is less difficult as the process of transforming someone's voice into another person's voice. The main problem areas in such a technology include:
Formant spectra:
Formant refers to the regions of concentrating of energy, prominent on a sound spectrogram. This collectively constitute the frequency spectrum of a speech sound.
Prosodic Features:
These are those aspects of speech that vary from person to person, like fundamental pitch of voice, timing and the different patterns of speech.
Mannerisms:
This refers to the word choices and the use of phrases that a person uses while talking.
The U.S.A.F. is looking for a variety of uses for such a technology. For example a person with a damaged voice box can surely benefit from this technology and this can also be useful in the gaming industry.
Via: technovelgy
