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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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: A research paper published by Google this month -- which has not been peer reviewed -- details a text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2, which claims near-human accuracy at imitating audio of a person speaking from text.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?
Of course this is more "AI" baloney as you can clearly tell it is speech synthesis. Even if it were indistinguishable, this is NOT AI. A "neural network" is nothing like a human brain. It is a weasel term to fool laypeople into thinking it is some sort of magic. Nice try Google. Keeping pushing your Google Home gadgets.