Request for Proposals: Audiobox Responsible Generation Grant

Meta researchers introduce Audiobox, a new foundation audio generative model with enhanced controllability that aids users to more easily create their desired voices and sound effects. Audiobox can generate speech, voices and sound effects using a combination of voice inputs and natural language text – making it easy to create custom audio for a wide range of use cases.

Audiobox represents a huge step toward democratizing audio generation capabilities. Audio plays a fundamental role in many forms of media, from movies to podcasts, audiobooks, and video games. In the future, they believe research breakthroughs such as these will lower the barrier of accessibility for audio creation and make it easy for anyone to become an audio content creator.

At Meta, they deeply care about conducting audio and speech research responsibly and have implemented new technologies towards that end. They also believe issues in audio and speech research cannot be addressed by an individual or single organization alone. In particular, they value a diverse set of partners to tackle the Responsible AI aspects of this work. They are launching a call for proposals from two groups:

• Researchers who want to conduct Responsible AI Research and advance areas such as safety, fairness, ethics and impersonation / deepfake detection, and enable a future where speech and audio models can be used responsibly and safely.
• Researchers who want to advance state-of-the-art speech and audio generation performance by leveraging AudioBox models.

Funding Information

• Through this grant, the FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team at Meta will provide:
  • Access to Audiobox models and relevant code artifacts to groups of researchers at academic institutions and research labs
  • Funding up to $50,000 to further their work.

Eligibility Criteria

• This Grant Program is open to Organizations located in countries where local law does not prohibit their participation or the receipt of an award. Individuals and/or Organizations that are
  • the target of any trade sanctions or export control restrictions administered or enforced by the U.S., EU, United Nations, or UK;
  • acting on behalf of anyone else who is the target of such trade sanctions or export control restrictions; or
  • organized or located in the U.S. States of Illinois or Texas, Belarus, China, Russia, Ukraine, or any country or region that is the target of comprehensive economic or financial sanctions (e.g., Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and Syria, as such list may be amended) are not eligible to participate.
• Eligible Organizations must be one of the following:
  • A non-profit organization: The non-profit organization must operate solely for a “charitable purpose” as defined under U.S. law and be organized as either a 501(c)3 entity (in the U.S.) or the local equivalent indicating governmental designation that the organization is a not-for-profit entity; Organizations claiming non-profit status must be able to provide valid proof of their tax-exempt status
  • An academic institution: An academic institution is defined as an accredited institution (colleges, universities or other educational institutions) of higher learning that grants degrees which can be public, private, or non-profit.
  • A research institution: A research institution is defined as an establishment outside of higher education founded for doing research which can be public, private, or non-profit.

Requirements

• The Proposal must meet all of the following requirements
  • Proposal must be written in English
    Proposal must not have been previously licensed, sold, used, published, released, exhibited, distributed or otherwise commercially exploited in any form.
  • Proposal must only include content about persons or entities from whom the Organization has all necessary permissions and rights, including, if applicable, permission from any referenced or depicted minor’s parent or legal guardian
  • Proposal must not infringe, misappropriate, or violate any rights of any third-party including, without limitation, copyright (including moral rights), trademark, trade secret, patent or rights of privacy or publicity. To the extent the Proposal includes any third-party content, Organization must have all rights, licenses and permissions to use the third-party content in accordance with the Grant Terms, and must provide proof of such third-party rights, licenses and permissions upon request by Grantor
  • Proposal must comply with all applicable federal, national, provincial, state, territorial, and local laws, rules, or regulations in connection with participating in the Grant Program.

For more information, visit Meta.