Freeware is software , most often proprietary , that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user . There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license , or EULA that defines freeware unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the freeware it offers. For instance, modification , redistribution by third parties, and reverse engineering are permitted by some publishers but prohibited by others. Unlike with free and open-source software , which are also often distributed free of charge, the source code for freeware is typically not made available. Freeware may be intended to benefit its producer by, for example, encouraging sales of a more capable version, as in the freemium and shareware business models .
49-461: 15.ai was a freeware artificial intelligence web application that generated text-to-speech voices from fictional characters from various media sources. Created by a pseudonymous developer under the alias 15 , the project used a combination of audio synthesis algorithms, speech synthesis deep neural networks , and sentiment analysis models to generate emotive character voices faster than real-time. In early 2020, 15.ai appeared online as
98-479: A BBEdit Lite edition which has fewer features. XnView is available free of charge for personal use but must be licensed for commercial use. The "free" version may be advertising supported, as was the case with the DivX . Ad-supported software and registerware also bear resemblances to freeware. Ad-supported software does not ask for payment for a license, but displays advertising to either cover development costs or as
147-415: A discriminative model or a non-commercial generative model was deemed legal. The legality of commercial generative models trained using copyrighted material is still under debate; due to the black-box nature of machine learning models, any allegations of copyright infringement via direct competition would be difficult to prove. 15.ai was designed and created by an anonymous research scientist known by
196-486: A proof of concept of the democratization of voice acting and dubbing . Its gratis nature, ease of use without user accounts , and improvements over existing text-to-speech implementations made it popular. Some critics and voice actors questioned the legality and ethicality of making such technology so readily accessible. The site was credited as the impetus behind the popularization of AI voice cloning (also known as audio deepfakes ) in content creation . It
245-452: A breakthrough in the field of speech synthesis. The project also introduced the concept of "emotional contextualizers" for controlling speech emotion through sentiment analysis . Some voice actors have publicly decried the use of voice cloning technology. Cited reasons include concerns about copyright infringement , right to privacy , impersonation and fraud , unauthorized use of an actor's voice in pornography or explicit content , and
294-412: A donation to the provider)". Some freeware products are released alongside paid versions that either have more features or less restrictive licensing terms. This approach is known as freemium ("free" + "premium"), since the "free" version is intended as a promotion for the premium version. The two often share a code base, using a compiler flag to determine which is produced. For example, BBEdit has
343-415: A generated line using emotional contextualizers (a term coined by this project), a sentence or phrase conveying the emotion of the take that serves as a guide for the model during inference. Emotional contextualizers were representations of the emotional content of a sentence deduced via transfer learned emoji embeddings using DeepMoji , a deep neural network sentiment analysis algorithm developed by
392-582: A large dataset crowdsourced by the project: audio and dialogue from the show and related media—including all nine seasons of Friendship Is Magic , the 2017 movie , spinoffs , leaks , and various other content voiced by the same voice actors—were parsed , hand-transcribed , and processed to remove background noise. 15.ai was met with a largely positive reception. Liana Ruppert of Game Informer described it as "simplistically brilliant" and José Villalobos of LaPS4 wrote that it "works as easy as it looks." Lauren Morton of Rock, Paper, Shotgun called
441-918: A limited evaluation period, after which the software is automatically disabled or starts displaying a request to pay a registration fee. In the latter case it is colloquially known as nagware. The Creative Commons offer licenses , applicable to all by copyright governed works including software, which allow a developer to define "freeware" in a legal safe and internationally law domains respecting way. The typical freeware use case "share" can be further refined with Creative Commons restriction clauses like non-commerciality ( CC BY-NC ) or no- derivatives ( CC BY-ND ), see description of licenses . There are several usage examples , for instance The White Chamber , Mari0 or Assault Cube , all freeware by being CC BY-NC-SA licensed with only non-commercial sharing allowed. Freeware cannot economically rely on commercial promotion. In May 2015 advertising freeware on Google AdWords
490-472: A means of income. Registerware forces the user to subscribe with the publisher before being able to use the product. While commercial products may require registration to ensure licensed use , registerware do not. Shareware permits redistribution, but the license only allows limited use before paying the license fee. Some features may be disabled prior to payment, in which case it is sometimes known as crippleware. Both freeware and shareware sometimes have
539-562: A personal desktop assistant inspired by GLaDOS using 15.ai-generated dialogue in tandem with voice control system VoiceAttack. On January 14, 2022, it was discovered that Voiceverse NFT, a company that video game and anime dub voice actor Troy Baker announced his partnership with, had plagiarized voice lines generated from 15.ai as part of their marketing campaign. Log files showed that Voiceverse had generated audio of characters from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic using 15.ai, pitched them up to make them sound unrecognizable from
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#1732858266894588-562: A price. According to the Free Software Foundation (FSF), "freeware" is a loosely defined category and it has no clear accepted definition, although FSF asks that free software (libre; unrestricted and with source code available) should not be called freeware. In contrast the Oxford English Dictionary simply characterizes freeware as being "available free of charge (sometimes with the suggestion that users should make
637-401: A resurgence in video and musical content creation as a result, inspiring a new genre of fan-created content assisted by artificial intelligence. Some fanfictions weren adapted into fully voiced "episodes": The Tax Breaks is a 17-minute long animated video rendition of a fan-written story published in 2014 that uses voices generated from 15.ai with sound effects and audio editing , emulating
686-405: A single entity to be responsible for updating and enhancing the product, which is then given away without charge. Other freeware projects are simply released as one-off programs with no promise or expectation of further development. These may include source code , as does free software, so that users can make any required or desired changes themselves, but this code remains subject to the license of
735-746: A source domain D S {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}_{S}} and learning task T S {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}_{S}} , a target domain D T {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}_{T}} and learning task T T {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}_{T}} , where D S ≠ D T {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}_{S}\neq {\mathcal {D}}_{T}} , or T S ≠ T T {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}_{S}\neq {\mathcal {T}}_{T}} , transfer learning aims to help improve
784-499: A specific domain, D = { X , P ( X ) } {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}=\{{\mathcal {X}},P(X)\}} , a task consists of two components: a label space Y {\displaystyle {\mathcal {Y}}} and an objective predictive function f : X → Y {\displaystyle f:{\mathcal {X}}\rightarrow {\mathcal {Y}}} . The function f {\displaystyle f}
833-505: Is a technique in machine learning (ML) in which knowledge learned from a task is re-used in order to boost performance on a related task. For example, for image classification , knowledge gained while learning to recognize cars could be applied when trying to recognize trucks. This topic is related to the psychological literature on transfer of learning , although practical ties between the two fields are limited. Reusing/transferring information from previously learned tasks to new tasks has
882-428: Is available for use without charge and typically has limited functionality with a more capable version available commercially or as shareware. It is typically fully functional for an unlimited period of time. In contrast to what the Free Software Foundation calls free software , the author of freeware usually restricts the rights of the user to use, copy, distribute, modify, make derivative works, or reverse engineer
931-519: Is given in terms of domains and tasks. A domain D {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}} consists of: a feature space X {\displaystyle {\mathcal {X}}} and a marginal probability distribution P ( X ) {\displaystyle P(X)} , where X = { x 1 , . . . , x n } ∈ X {\displaystyle X=\{x_{1},...,x_{n}\}\in {\mathcal {X}}} . Given
980-504: Is software where "the Government does not have access to the original source code". The "free" in "freeware" refers to the price of the software, which is typically proprietary and distributed without source code. By contrast, the "free" in "free software" refers to freedoms granted users under the software license (for example, to run the program for any purpose, modify and redistribute the program to others), and such software may be sold at
1029-529: Is sufficient to clone a voice up to human standards, a significant reduction in the amount of data required. A landmark case between Google and the Authors Guild in 2013 ruled that Google Books —a service that searches the full text of printed copyrighted books—was transformative , thus meeting all requirements for fair use. This case set an important legal precedent for the field of deep learning and artificial intelligence: using copyrighted material to train
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#17328582668941078-733: Is used to predict the corresponding label f ( x ) {\displaystyle f(x)} of a new instance x {\displaystyle x} . This task, denoted by T = { Y , f ( x ) } {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}=\{{\mathcal {Y}},f(x)\}} , is learned from the training data consisting of pairs { x i , y i } {\displaystyle \{x_{i},y_{i}\}} , where x i ∈ X {\displaystyle x_{i}\in {\mathcal {X}}} and y i ∈ Y {\displaystyle y_{i}\in {\mathcal {Y}}} . Given
1127-718: The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom , the Team Fortress 2 fandom, the Portal fandom, and the SpongeBob SquarePants fandom, with numerous videos and projects containing speech from 15.ai having gone viral . The platform is credited as the impetus behind the popularization of AI voice cloning in content creation, demonstrating the potential for accessible, high-quality voice synthesis technology. The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom saw
1176-671: The MIT Media Lab in 2017. DeepMoji was trained on 1.2 billion emoji occurrences in Twitter data from 2013 to 2017, and outperformed human subjects in correctly identifying sarcasm in Tweets and other online modes of communication. 15.ai used a multi-speaker model —hundreds of voices were trained concurrently rather than sequentially, decreasing the required training time and enabling the model to learn and generalize shared emotional context, even for voices with no exposure to that context. Consequently,
1225-465: The Narrator from The Stanley Parable , Carl Brutananadilewski from Aqua Teen Hunger Force , Steven Universe , Dan from Dan Vs. , and Sans from Undertale . The nondeterministic nature of the deep learning model ensured that each generation would have slightly different intonations, similar to multiple takes from a voice actor . The application supported manually altering the emotion of
1274-410: The alias 15 . Developing and running 15.ai cost several thousands of dollars per month, initially funded by the developer's personal finances after a successful startup exit. The algorithm used by the project was dubbed DeepThroat. The project and algorithm were conceived as part of MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program , and had been in development since 2018. The model used by 15.ai
1323-419: The book Learning to Learn in 1998, a 2009 survey and a 2019 survey. Ng said in his NIPS 2016 tutorial that TL would become the next driver of machine learning commercial success after supervised learning . In the 2020 paper, "Rethinking Pre-Training and self-training", Zoph et al. reported that pre-training can hurt accuracy, and advocate self-training instead. The definition of transfer learning
1372-478: The characters in the application were powered by a single trained model, as opposed to multiple single-speaker models. The lexicon used by 15.ai was scraped from a variety of Internet sources, including Oxford Dictionaries , Wiktionary , the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary , 4chan , Reddit , and Twitter . Pronunciations of unfamiliar words were automatically deduced using phonological rules learned by
1421-636: The compiled executable and does not constitute free software. A "free" trial is another related concept in which customers are allowed to use a product, free of charge, for a limited time. When a software monopoly has a strong network effect, it may be more profitable for it to offer a "free" trial. Also, customers acquired via a "free" trial have a much lower customer lifetime value as opposed to regular customers, but they also respond more to marketing communications . Some factors that may encourage or discourage people to use "free" trials include: Transfer learning Transfer learning ( TL )
1470-458: The creator's most recent post being dated February 2023. The platform required no user registration or account creation to generate voices. Users could generate speech by entering text and selecting a character voice (optionally specifying an emotional contextualizer and/or phonetic transcriptions), with the system producing three variations of the audio with different emotional deliveries. The platform operated completely free of charge , though
1519-446: The deep learning model. The application supported a simplified phonetic transcription known as ARPABET , to correct mispronunciations and account for heteronyms —words that are spelled the same but are pronounced differently (such as the word read , which can be pronounced as either / ˈ r ɛ d / or / ˈ r iː d / depending on its tense ). It followed the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary 's ARPABET conventions. In 2016, with
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1568-475: The developer reported spending thousands of dollars monthly to maintain the service. Available characters included GLaDOS and Wheatley from Portal , characters from Team Fortress 2 , Twilight Sparkle and other characters from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic , SpongeBob , Daria Morgendorffer and Jane Lane from Daria , the Tenth Doctor Who , HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey ,
1617-468: The episodic style of the early seasons of Friendship Is Magic . Viral videos from the Team Fortress 2 fandom featuring voices from 15.ai include Spy is a Furry (which gained over 3 million views on YouTube across multiple videos) and The RED Bread Bank , both of which inspired Source Filmmaker animated video renditions. Other fandoms used voices from 15.ai to produce viral videos. As of July 2022,
1666-789: The learning of the target predictive function f T ( ⋅ ) {\displaystyle f_{T}(\cdot )} in D T {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}_{T}} using the knowledge in D S {\displaystyle {\mathcal {D}}_{S}} and T S {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}_{S}} . Algorithms are available for transfer learning in Markov logic networks and Bayesian networks . Transfer learning has been applied to cancer subtype discovery, building utilization , general game playing , text classification , digit recognition, medical imaging and spam filtering . In 2020, it
1715-437: The model was able to produce intelligible speech with mediocre quality, and when trained on 36 minutes of speech, the model was unable to produce intelligible speech. For years, reducing the amount of data required to train a realistic high-quality text-to-speech model has been a primary goal of scientific researchers in the field of deep learning speech synthesis. The developer of 15.ai claims that as little as 15 seconds of data
1764-608: The original voices to market their own platform—in violation of 15.ai's terms of service. Voiceverse claimed that someone in their marketing team used the voice without properly crediting 15.ai, and in response, 15 tweeted "Go fuck yourself." 15.ai introduced several technical innovations in voice cloning . While traditional text-to-speech systems like Google 's Tacotron2 required tens of hours of audio data to produce intelligible speech in 2017, 15.ai claimed to achieve high-quality voice cloning with as little as 15 seconds of training data. This reduction in required training data represented
1813-478: The potential of AI being used to make voice actors obsolete . In his 2020 assessment of 15.ai in artificial intelligence newsletter The Batch , computer scientist Andrew Ng wrote: "Voice cloning could be enormously productive. In Hollywood , it could revolutionize the use of virtual actors. In cartoons and audiobooks, it could enable voice actors to participate in many more productions. In online education, kids might pay more attention to lessons delivered by
1862-399: The potential to significantly improve learning efficiency. Since transfer learning makes use of training with multiple objective functions it is related to cost-sensitive machine learning and multi-objective optimization . In 1976, Bozinovski and Fulgosi published a paper addressing transfer learning in neural network training. The paper gives a mathematical and geometrical model of
1911-412: The proposal of DeepMind 's WaveNet , deep-learning-based models for speech synthesis began to gain popularity as a method of modeling waveforms and generating high-fidelity human-like speech. Tacotron2, a neural network architecture for speech synthesis developed by Google AI , was published in 2018 and required tens of hours of audio data to produce intelligible speech; when trained on 2 hours of speech,
1960-583: The software. The software license may impose additional usage restrictions; for instance, the license may be "free for private, non-commercial use" only, or usage over a network, on a server, or in combination with certain other software packages may be prohibited. Restrictions may be required by license or enforced by the software itself; e.g., the package may fail to function over a network. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) defines "open source software" (i.e., free software or free and open-source software), as distinct from "freeware" or "shareware"; it
2009-447: The tool "fascinating," and Yuki Kurosawa of AUTOMATON deemed it "revolutionary." Users praised the ability to easily create audio of popular characters that sound believable to those unaware they had been synthesized. Zack Zwiezen of Kotaku reported that "[his] girlfriend was convinced it was a new voice line from GLaDOS ' voice actor, Ellen McLain ". 15.ai was frequently used for content creation in various fandoms , including
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2058-477: The topic. In 1981, a report considered the application of transfer learning to a dataset of images representing letters of computer terminals, experimentally demonstrating positive and negative transfer learning. In 1992, Lorien Pratt formulated the discriminability-based transfer (DBT) algorithm. By 1998, the field had advanced to include multi-task learning , along with more formal theoretical foundations. Influential publications on transfer learning include
2107-574: The viral video Among Us Struggles (with voices from Friendship Is Magic ) had over 5.5 million views on YouTube; YouTubers , TikTokers , and Twitch streamers also used 15.ai for their videos, such as FitMC's video on the history of 2b2t —one of the oldest running Minecraft servers—and datpon3's TikTok video featuring the main characters of Friendship Is Magic , which have 1.4 million and 510 thousand views, respectively. Some users created AI virtual assistants using 15.ai and external voice control software. One user on Twitter created
2156-460: The voices of favorite personalities. And how many YouTube how-to video producers would love to have a synthetic Morgan Freeman narrate their scripts? However, he also wrote: "...but synthesizing a human actor's voice without consent is arguably unethical and possibly illegal. And this technology will be catnip for deepfakers, who could scrape recordings from social networks to impersonate private individuals." Freeware The term freeware
2205-438: Was coined in 1982 by Andrew Fluegelman , who wanted to sell PC-Talk , the communications application he had created, outside of commercial distribution channels. Fluegelman distributed the program via the same process as shareware . As software types can change, freeware can change into shareware. In the 1980s and 1990s, the term freeware was often applied to software released without source code . Freeware software
2254-471: Was discovered that, due to their similar physical natures, transfer learning is possible between electromyographic (EMG) signals from the muscles and classifying the behaviors of electroencephalographic (EEG) brainwaves, from the gesture recognition domain to the mental state recognition domain. It was noted that this relationship worked in both directions, showing that electroencephalographic can likewise be used to classify EMG. The experiments noted that
2303-420: Was embraced by Internet fandoms such as My Little Pony , Team Fortress 2 , and SpongeBob SquarePants . Several commercial alternatives appeared in the following years. In January 2022, the company Voiceverse NFT plagiarized 15.ai's work as part of their platform. In September 2022, a year after its last stable release, 15.ai was taken offline. As of November 2024, the website was still offline, with
2352-548: Was inspired by a 2019 paper that introduced transfer learning to text-to-speech models. The developer also worked closely with the Pony Preservation Project from /mlp/, the My Little Pony board of 4chan . This project was a "collaborative effort by /mlp/ to build and curate pony datasets" with the aim of creating applications in artificial intelligence. The Friendship Is Magic voices on 15.ai were trained on
2401-509: Was restricted to "authoritative source"[s]. Thus web sites and blogs are the primary resource for information on which freeware is available, useful, and is not malware . However, there are also many computer magazines or newspapers that provide ratings for freeware and include compact discs or other storage media containing freeware. Freeware is also often bundled with other products such as digital cameras or scanners . Freeware has been criticized as "unsustainable" because it requires
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