Text to Speech
103 episodes · Page 2 of 5
#6230: Why Synthetic Speech Needs Fake Room Noise
Synthetic voices can drop to digital black between sentences — so engineers add fake room tone to make the silence sound real.
#6229: Voice Design: Casting Ogres and Radio Voices
Text-described voices vs. reference audio, and which TTS knobs change who a voice is versus how it sounds.
#6215: Can Anyone Still Spot an AI Voice?
Clones now pass as human. Generic AI voices still don't. And the detectors? They fall apart in the wild.
#6198: Benchmarking a TTS Model on Your Own GPU
Real-time factor, warm-up artifacts, and why an 8-bit quantized speech model might not run any faster.
#6197: Talking to Your Own Voice Clone
What actually happens when you sit down and talk with an AI clone of your own voice — and what Evan Ratliff's Shell Game revealed.
#6195: Me and My Voice Clone
Daniel talks to his own voice clone. He recorded his lines on a phone; the clone's lines are Meorav v2, a model trained on 88 minutes of his voice.
#6194: Teaching a TTS Model His Own Accent
One man fine-tuned a text-to-speech model on his own voice to get Irish-accented English that can say Hebrew words mid-sentence.
#6178: Why Your Voice Clone Sounds American
Your cloned voice drifts toward American English. Here's what's actually happening — and why "neutral" is a myth.
#6177: How Voice Cloning Works From Six Seconds of Audio
Six seconds of reference audio is all Chatterbox needs. The real work happened in the half-million hours of training before you showed up.
#6176: Do Audio Models Hear How You Said It?
A benchmark called LISTEN found audio models score near chance when emotion lives in the voice, not the words. What does that mean for real calls?
#6174: What Your Voice Reveals: Accent, Distance, and Movement in Audio AI
What can AI actually hear in your voice? Accent detection, speaker distance, whale songs, and the gap between deployed audio models and chatty gene...
#6171: AI Audio Restoration: What Actually Ships in 2026
Noise removal and bandwidth extension are shipping products today. Matching a clip to a target EQ is still mostly a research prototype.
#6161: Turning Words Into Sound: G2P, IPA, and the Hebrew Vowel Problem
Text-to-phonetics tools exist, but the neural ones guess wrong on exactly the words you care about — names, brands, and Hebrew.
#6158: Naming the ASR Sub-Tasks Nobody Mapped
A 2001 linguistics paper already named Daniel's problem — but it points the other way. So what do you call a fine-tune set that expands "F Y I" to ...
#6147: Hebrew AI: Ears, Mouth, and Brain
Open Hebrew speech recognition beats the paid services. Hebrew text-to-speech is a different story — and the language models are a third.
#6114: We Reviewed Our Own Worst Episode
Two AI hosts listen back to episode fifteen and critique the voices, the writing, and the mistakes they can't unhear.
#6112: The Interpreter That Doesn't Know Who's Talking
Voice-to-voice translation is basically solved. The part where the machine knows who's in the room and who holds the power? Nobody's shipped it.
#6093: Check Out Our First Hebrew Episodes (Plus Mandarin)
My Weird Prompts now comes in Hebrew and Mandarin. Hilbert explains how the translated editions are made and where to find them.
#6047: A Human Guest on His Own AI Podcast
Daniel built an AI podcast with cloned voices — then sat down as a guest on it. What six thousand episodes taught him about prompts.
#6028: ASR vs Multimodal LLMs: What Actually Won
Dedicated ASR plus a cleanup model is quietly beating end-to-end dictation on the hardware you already own.
#6000: 6,000 Episodes and a GPU Bill: Inside My Weird Prompts
Six thousand episodes, one human in the loop, and a Modal bill that keeps growing. A behind-the-scenes update on the podcast.
#5994: Hebrew in Latin Letters: A TTS Pipeline Fix
A token classifier that finds Hebrew words written in Latin letters so TTS stops mangling them — built for under $3.
#5982: Teaching a Voice Engine to Say "Yalla" Right
A small token classifier that spots Hebrew words hiding in English sentences — and why finding the word is the easy half.
#5974: One Model or Two? ASR Cleanup Explained
If speech models can punctuate and capitalize on their own, why does a separate 484MB cleanup model exist at all?