Google's Voice-Generating AI Is Now Indistinguishable From Humans (qz.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: A research paper published by Google this month -- which has not been peer reviewed -- details a text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2, which claims near-human accuracy at imitating audio of a person speaking from text. The system is Google's second official generation of the technology, which consists of two deep neural networks. The first network translates the text into a spectrogram (pdf), a visual way to represent audio frequencies over time. That spectrogram is then fed into WaveNet, a system from Alphabet's AI research lab DeepMind, which reads the chart and generates the corresponding audio elements accordingly. The Google researchers also demonstrate that Tacotron 2 can handle hard-to-pronounce words and names, as well as alter the way it enunciates based on punctuation. For instance, capitalized words are stressed, as someone would do when indicating that specific word is an important part of a sentence. Quartz has embedded several different examples in their report that feature a sentence generated by AI along with a sentence read aloud from a human hired by Google. Can you tell which is the AI generated sample?

Comments

Re: What about accents?

[Anonymous Coward]

As speech synthesis rises in usage, my guess is evolution will eliminate harder accents like the Irish, Jamaican, Cuban, etc. It will also eventually eliminate plosive sounds, etc. The language we speak will end up leaving towards how these systems speak because they'll be more ubiquitous.