Federal prosecutors are seeking for Elizabeth Holmes to pay a monthly amount of $250 to victims of her failed blood testing startup after she leaves prison — but her attorneys have pushed back, and cited the ex-Theranos CEO’s “limited financial resources.”

Azerbaijan’s refusal to attend a summit orchestrated by Emmanuel Macron is casting doubt on the French president’s diplomatic

Alex Lewis Marsh admitted that his daughter Scarlett Marie Marsh was crying and he threw a large gray blanket on top of her

How Ukraine's 2016 Eurovision winner Jamala saved traditional Crimean folk songs from the war.

A month highlighted by gambling-related firings and potential NCAA infractions in college sports motivated the Southeastern Conference to put extra emphasis on the issue at this week’s spring meetings

Germany’s energy network regulator promised a bigger payback for investors in power and gas grids, a decision that’s

Lance Reddick was part of the 2023 remake of the 1992 classic 'White Man Can't Jump'

Core Love was involved in a major car accident which led him to lose all of his previous memories

Probes into Gilgo Beach serial killings suspect Rex Heuermann now reach across the country as investigators are examining his connections to Las Vegas and South Carolina, where the suspect has owned property.

While Houston Astros relief pitcher Bryan Abreu will appeal his two-game suspension for plunking Adolis Garcia, it could hurt his team in the long run.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said it was "unfortunate" China declined a US offer to speak at a defense summit this week in Singapore and that the ongoing lack of communication could result in "an incident that could very, very quickly spiral out of control."

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