Neural audio codecs: how to get audio into LLMs

> Try asking any of them “Am I speaking in a low voice or a high voice?” in a high-pitched voice, and they won’t be able to tell you.

I wonder how much of that is LLMs being bad, and how much is LLMs being (over) aligned not to do it.

AFAIK, Chat GPT Voice mode had to have a lot of safeguards put on it to prevent music generation, accent matching (if you sound Indian, it shouldn't also sound Indian), and assuming ethnicity / biasing based on accents.

It doesn't seem that impossible to me that some of these behaviors have been aligned out of these models out of an abundance of caution.

I don't think it's just safeguards; they really don't seem to understand pitch at all. I tried asking ChatGPT's advanced voice mode to recognize a tune I was humming, and it insisted it was Beethoven's 5th -- multiple times. I think it must have basically tokenized my humming to "dun dun dun duuun".

advanced voice mode operates on audio tokens directly, it doesn't transcribe them into "text tokens" as an intermediate step like the original version of voice mode did.