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BBC Launches Machine-Translated Synthetic Voiceovers (bbc.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC News service is trialling a tool which provides synthesized journalist voice-overs in different languages, with translation provided by unspecified established online translation services. Although the simulated speech in the BBC video betrays itself with the characteristic staccato flow most associated with Stephen Hawking, the result is above average in terms of natural-sounding speech. However, journalists still need to clean up the returned translations, particularly as the initial test involves Russian and Japanese, and oriental auto-translations can prove embarrassing.
Todos ustedes son vacas. Las vacas dicen moo.
At least in Japanese the artificial voice is quite good, on the first few seconds its difficult to say if its a person or a machine reading the text, but eventually you begin to notice the uniformity of the tone no matter what the news are. At least for now they are choosing minor news to try it, so its not so much of a problem having the voice-over sounding happy and light while reading about dozens of dead people on a landslide or something.