I've been super interested in topics like machine learning and artificial intelligence for around a year now. Funnily enough, me getting back into ponies and me getting interested in machine learning go hand in hand!
When I stopped being super into ponies, I still would watch videos by bronies and other pony fans from time to time if they popped up in my Youtube recommended. At one point I found a video by a 3d fan-animator looking for a voice actress who can do a good Pinkie Pie impression. Someone in the comments mentioned something called the 'Pony Preservation Project' (no, not the website with info on G1 restoration) and I was intrigued.
I did some digging, and I was wowed by what I found! Apparently some bronies on some other site (yuck, some other site) had gotten sad that Friendship is Magic was ending. Then some machine learning technicians in the fandom showed up and came up with the idea to train an AI on audio from the show, and recreate the voices of the characters. That way, getting voices for fanworks is made much easier!
Eventually they had all gathered voicelines of
every speaking role in the entire series. Then several different people with experience in machine learning took the audio and individually got to work trying to train AIs on it all.
One person who is using the gathered audio calls himself 15. No one is really 100% sure exactly who he is, beyond the fact that he has connections and funding from
MIT, which is pretty amazing. He's helping as part of his research project. He created a website that hosts AI-based text to speech versions of not just MLP characters, but all sorts of characters! You can find it here.
https://15.ai/aboutIt's down for maintenance right now, but he has several examples up, and a list of planned characters as well. His results are MINDBLOWING, they sound super real compared to most other people's results. They still aren't perfect, the artificialness is noticable at times, but he probably has the most state of the art stuff available right now. It's so incredible that he lets normal people use his text to speech. Most scientists keep this stuff between themselves.
I can't wait until the site becomes active again! He has a secret testing site that I'm actually able to access, but he doesn't want anyone to leak it, so I won't post it here.
He accepts submissions of audio datasets as long as they're prepared correctly, I wonder if someone could make a dataset out of another MLP gen? Imagine having a text to speech version of a G3 or G1 pony!
Sorry for rambling, I'm super passionate about these things. I actually learned how to train AIs myself from Cookie, one of the other Pony Preservation Project techies! I'm actually training a text to speech model right now haha
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