Softwares

What happened to Loquendo, that canned voice that Spanish-speaking youtubers turned into an Internet phenomenon

In these times in which so many applications and platforms receive names in English or derived from it, ‘Loquendo’ is, on the contrary, a word derived directly from the Latin: it is the gerundive (future participle) of the verb ‘loquor’ (to speak), and can be translated as ‘what will be spoken’ or ‘what is speakable’. But don’t worry, the beginning of this story does not go back to Julius Caesar and Cicero, but only to the mid-70s. Although, yes, it is also located in Italy.

It was then that the CSELT (Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni), a research institution in Turin attached to the Institute for Industrial Reconstrution of Italy, created the first highly intelligible speech synthesizer capable of speaking (and singing) Italiancalled MUSE (MUltichannel Speaking Automaton), which used diphones (vowel and consonant combinations) pre-recorded to synthesize voices. The first practical application of it was to create the voices for the musical album ‘La voce del calcolatore’ (computer voice), released in 1978. And if you’re wondering… yes, we’ve come a long way since then:

That technology, however, became the basis for much more refined applications released during the 1990s, also by the CSELT, as ‘ELOQUENS’ or ‘ACTOR’. Finally, in 2001, Telecom Italia (successor to CSELT) created crazy as a commercial company intended to exploit all this speech synthesis technology. At that time, the new company was developing multiple tools for both home users and large call center servers.

The loquenders arrive

It would still be five years before, on May 22, 2006a user called ‘fingazzz’ (a Valencian named Mateo, who proclaims himself on Twitter “Father of loquenderos until proven otherwise”) uploaded to an almost newly created YouTube the first ‘loquender’ video in history, which immediately became a viral hit and started the fever for this kind of content. We are talking, of course, about ‘Still Dorito’:

A few months later, another Spanish user (MrCoucou) started a fashion that would eventually generate thousands of videos on YouTube, the video reviews with Loquendo. The funniest thing is that many users still took a while to find out where that characteristic voice that seemed to be present on multiple YouTube channels came from… even when youtubers began to add the word ‘Loquendo’ to the title or description of their videos , many comments implied that they thought he was a voice actor.

When it became clear what Loquendo was and what it allowed to be done, this phenomenon of videos with Loquendo, initially 100% Spanish, expanded with great success to Latin Americawhere it became fashionable to use this voice synthesis software to publish criticisms (when not mere successions of insults) against all kinds of groups (otakus, reggaeton, emos…).

The English Wikipedia itself stands out, despite the existence of successful English-speaking ‘loquenders’ such as loquendointeractivethat “Loquendo’s voice synthesis has become an Internet meme on YouTube, although it is more common in Spanish language videos“.

The most viewed videos in the history of YouTube that mention ‘Loquendo’

After that first wave of ‘loquenders’, another wave would arrive in 2009 focused on the publication parodic dubbing of gameplays, preferably from the game ‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’), as well as anime reviews. Around this time, most of these dubbings were created using the free application TextAloud, which made it possible to synthesize speech from text.

Today it is possible to use a few seconds of recording of any voice and have an AI synthesize it

The ‘cracked’ packs of TextAloud and Loquendo voices were all the rage for a while…

Global interest in Loquendo peaked between the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012., more or less at the time when Telecom Italia decided all its shares in Loquendo to Nuance, a company specializing in OCR and speech recognition systems that, a decade later, would end up being acquired by Microsoft. Nuance would close its doors in 2022, so Loquendo’s speech synthesis tools are now part of Microsoft’s portfolio of Technologys, just like other tech legends like Windows and Clippy.

Worldwide searches for Loquendo since 2004.

Related Topics:canned happened internet Loquendo phenomenon Spanishspeaking turned voice youtubers

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Softwares

This open-source tool allows you to scale any image and video for free with AI: this is how Video2X works

if what you are looking for a free and easy to use tool for scaling images and videos, you have come to the right place. And it is that the app that we are going to talk about next is open source and it makes use of your computer’s hardware to increase the resolution of any image or video, very useful for those occasions in which we have photos or videos of better quality.

Video2X makes use of the capabilities of our graphics card to scale images and videos in poor quality. Besides, supports multiple formats, so it will be very useful to also scale GIFs or videos in MP4, MKV and more formats. Under these lines we show you how it works.

A free tool to scale images and videos

To use this tool, all you have to do is go to its official Github page and download its latest version. Once the ZIP file is obtained, we unzip and we will have a folder with two executable files and other dependencies. In our case we will choose the file ‘video2x_gui.exe‘, since it has a graphical interface to proceed with the scaling.

If you look closely, you will find a lot of options. However, the tool works without applying any initial configuration. Just select the file from your computer via the ‘Select File’ option and then select the output path of the file from the ‘Output’ section. You can also modify the output name in the bottom text box.

After having configured the previous steps, we select ‘Start’ and the process will start automatically. You should know that the scaling process will be long, especially for videos, since it makes use of our graphics card for it. Even if you have a decent graphics card (in our case we used an RTX 3080), depending on the size of the video it could take several hours.

To testify to the qualities of this tool, its creators have uploaded several videos on YouTube that show the quality of the scaling, like this trailer for ‘Spirited Away’, which goes from 360p to 4K.

To scale the files, Video2X makes use of various techniques and algorithms. Through its documentation we can obtain information about which technique to use when scaling a file. For example, if we use ‘Anime4K’, the process will be faster than if we select ‘Waifu2x’, although the quality will be lower. However, if we use ‘realsr-ncnn-vulkan’, the process will be extremely slow, but the quality will be much better.

The techniques described above rely on frame interpolation processes, machine learning and artificial intelligence, which is why good hardware is required to complete the scaling efficiently. However, in case we do not have a decent graphics card, we can always make use of Google Colab and use a powerful graphics through the cloud to carry out the process.

Although we have mentioned before that the tool works without the need to enter the configuration section at any time, it is worth taking a look at all the options, since we will find sections to modify the level of noise applied, the size, quality and cropping of the file and much more. These options can be modified for each driver used.

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Softwares

This app beeps every time your browser sends data to Google. And it’s non-stop

Bert Hubert —developer, creator of PowerDNS and online privacy activist— has presented an application with which he intends to show how much data our computer sends to Google throughout a browsing session. And, so that we keep it in mind at all times, and we can relate what kind of actions trigger said shipments, alerts us by beeping every time this happens.

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Softwares

That e-mail that has come to you asking for a quote is the first step in a cyberattack

The Central Information Security Brigade of the National Police has issued an alert about a recent wave of cyberattacks directed against Spanish architecture companies (but which “may expand to other sectors in the future”) through a ransomware campaign that they describe as “of high sophistication”.

This attack, which resorts to spoofing, is using Scam emails posing as Fotoprix companya well-known photographic company.

Cyber criminals send messages from a fake domain, “fotoprix.eu”, requesting budgets for reforms in their facilities. The sophistication of this strategy lies in the fact that the messages are extremely consistent and appear to be legitimate, which reduces the suspicions of the victims.

After several email exchanges, the attackers propose to set up a meeting to finalize the budget. However, before the meeting, they send the victims an attachment containing details about the alleged reform.

By downloading and running this file In their systems, company terminals are automatically encrypted, leaving victims without access to their files and data.

Once the files are encrypted, cybercriminals demand a rescue to unlock the data. Instructions for making the ransom payment are included in a text file that is copied to affected systems.

This extortion tactic is characteristic of other ransomware attacks, where attackers seek financial gain in exchange for restoring access to victims’ files.

The high level of sophistication of the campaign makes it difficult for victims to suspect the hoax until they have already been affected.

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Tips to consider

The Central Cybercrime Unit of the National Police continues to work to track and contain this threat, but it is essential that companies remain vigilant and take proactive measures to protect themselves against these types of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.

Faced with this situation, the Police have developed the following basic recommendations to avoid being a victim of these attacks:

Beware of unknown emails: Do not open e-mails from unknown senders or those that have not been previously requested.
Avoid suspicious downloads: Do not download email attachments from unknown senders.
Keep systems up to date: Always keep the operating system and antivirus software updated to mitigate possible vulnerabilities.
Make backups: Make backup copies periodically and in independent systems, so that in the event of an attack the data can be recovered without the need to accept the payment of any ransom.

Via | Ministry of the Interior

Image | Marcos Merino through AI

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