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The future is apparently here. And it's creepier than we ever imagined—even when we were playing around with tethering Teddy Ruxpin to the Internet. A Japanese company called Vinclu ("a company that makes crazy things and supports crazy people") is now taking pre-orders from Japan and the United States for a new interactive, artificial-intelligence driven home automation system. Called Gatebox, the new Internet-of-Things product takes Amazon's Alexa, Google Home, Spike Jonze's film Her , and the "holographic" anime characters of Vocaloid concerts to their unified natural conclusion.
Wait, what?
Gatebox, priced at ¥321,840 (about $2,700 US), is squarely targeted at young lonely salarymen and all brands of anime-obsessed otaku—promising the experience of "living with your favorite character." The size of a home coffee-maker, with a footprint no larger than a sheet of A4 printer paper, the device's main feature is a clear projection tube that displays a computer-animated avatar for the AI's "character." Vinclu apparently is planning multiple possible personalities for Gatebox—which, as part of the device's backstory, is a gateway to the dimension the character lives in.
A company like this could release the first strong AI product (kawaii slave?).
Beginner's definition of "waifu" for the uninitiated.
Update: Another article indicates that "[There's also] HDMI and PC inputs to allow the owner to make their own modifications and create their own characters."
(Score: 3, Touché) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:36PM
>It's going to be maybe a week before some gross dude hooks up a fleshlight and hacks the speech synthesis program to make her talk dirty
That applies to everything. Everything, as per Rule 34.
>She's a tiny, skinny, submissive-looking thing
The nature of VOCALOID is such that the characters have many different appearances and personalities. Miku is a blood-thirsty murderer in quite a few appearance, certainly not submissive-looking when she's got a 12 inch knife. Similarly, the character's "ages" can range from child to mature adult to android in different appearances.
Even going by their "official" ages, Luka is 20, Miku is 16, Rin/Ren are 14. The rest don't have official ages, but their official art spans from elementary school to middle aged, and includes both "male" and "female" voices/characters.
VOCALOID is mostly portrayed as creepy in the media because that's what you guys want to hear. No one wants to hear news about voice synthesis software giving artists greater flexibility, but man are we excited to hear news about those creepos with their virtual pedo girlfriends who no doubt masturbate furiously in their basements and are latent child predators in the making, oh the horror and disgust!
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(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:46PM
And for good measure, Ren, the male twin, is indeed the target of many women "desiring" young boys. Yes, it happens, just like it happens with literally any fanbase, but keep in mind that this is always the vocal minority, most of the fanbase just like the material.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @12:01AM
I don't get Vocaloid. Music aside, it just sounds like you're listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks, like those god-awful "Alvin and the Chipmunks sing the latest pop songs" from the late 80's.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 21 2016, @04:38AM
The actual Vocaloid software has improved over time. Some of the remaining weirdness is probably related to the electronic style or use of auto-tuning. Or in the case of Japanese, more higher pitched squeakiness. I just looked on YouTube for a Vocaloid song and found this English one [youtube.com]. Would you put it in the Alvin bin?
In any case, synthesized speech in general appears to have made a dramatic leap in quality [soylentnews.org], among other machine learning tasks over at Google [soylentnews.org]. In a year or two, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and/or Samsung will upgrade their cloud-based AI assistants and make them sound great even if they still suck at figuring out what to do with complex queries. And in the next 5 years, I'd expect to see the synthesization of a single voice that can sound sultry, mad, sad, happy, caring, depressed, etc. without it just sounding like a squeaky robotic anime girl. That doesn't necessarily mean that voice actors are instantly out of a job... Vocaloid used human voice samples, and I expect newer machine learning voice algorithms to suck up as much real life data as possible.
Anyway, you get the sultry voice right, and a key piece of your sexbot or holographic waifu puzzle has been found.
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