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Google's DeepMind Develops New Speech Synthesis AI Algorithm Called WaveNet (qz.com)
Artem Tashkinov writes: Researchers behind Google's DeepMind company have been creating AI algorithms which could hardly be applied in real life aside from pure entertainment purposes -- the Go game being the most recent example. However, their most recent development, a speech synthesis AI algorithm called WaveNet, beats the two existing methods of generating human speech by a long shot -- at least 50% by Google's own estimates. The only problem with this new approach is that it's very computationally expensive. The results are even more impressive considering the fact that WaveNet can easily learn different voices and generate artificial breaths, mouth movements, intonation and other features of human speech. It can also be easily trained to generate any voice using a very small sample database. Quartz has a voice demo of Google's current method in its report, which uses recurrent neural networks, and WaveNet's method, which "uses convolutional neural networks, where previously generated data is considered when producing the next bit of information." The report adds, "Researchers also found that if they fed the algorithm classical music instead of speech, the algorithm would compose its own songs."
You reference 3 different nationalities - how is that a double standard?
You are not a frictionless sphere at rest on a perfect plane in a vacuum. Surprise!
Unless you are somewhere on the autism spectrum or being willfully obtuse, figuring out why people do things is not usually very difficult. As a fun exercise, try and figure it out for yourself using clues from history and culture.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Political Correctness is fascism with manners
Not yet, but I'm working on it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
speech synthesis and so called "artificial intelligence", are too different things.
Accurate speech synthesis, with appropriate pronunciation and intonation, is absolutely a subset of AI. There is no way to do it with a dumb algorithm, such as a lookup table. No one has done it without machine learning.
It will be great when games will be able to use non-pre-recorded speech for dialogs. No need to have characters express just two or three different game states with one recording each.
Ezekiel 23:20
This link https://text-to-speech-demo.my... allows you to experiment with the Watson version directly for anyone who is interested.
The word is that Star Trek: Discovery may attempt to use Majel Barrett's voice for the computer, due to her having recorded a complete phonetic sample before she passed. If this really does outperform the best available TTS engines, then perhaps DeepMind would be a good fit to generate that for the show: since it's supposed to be a computer, it's not the end of the world if it doesn't sound completely human...