Amazon is Teaching Alexa To Speak Like a Newscaster (theverge.com)

The way newscasters speak is unmistakeable, with their exaggerated modulations and drawn-out pauses. And now, Amazon has taught Alexa, its voice assistant, to approximate the authoritative intonation. From a report: You can listen to samples of the speaking style here, and the results, well, they speak for themselves. The voice can't be mistaken for a human, but it does incorporates stresses into sentences in the same way you'd expect from a TV or radio newscaster. According to Amazon's own surveys, users prefer it to Alexa's regular speaking style when listening to articles (though getting news from smart speakers still has lots of other problems).

Amazon says the new speaking style is enabled by by the company's development of "neural text-to-speech" technology or NTTS. This is the next generation of speech synthesis, that use machine learning to generate expressive voices more quickly. Currently, Alexa uses concatenative speech synthesis, a method that's been around for decades. This involves breaking up speech samples into distinct sounds (known as phonemes) and then stitching them back together to form new words and sentences.

Comments

Sweet, will it also teach Alexa

[rsilvergun]

how to badger left wing candidates for sound bites they can later use against them and read the same script of right wing talking points

Yeah, I know, off topic. But maybe not. If we can replace the few honest news anchors left with robots that parrot the party line then it'll be establishment propaganda 24/7. Heck, they'll have to make it 25/8 just to fit all that nonsense in. And it's not like they can't change it, since they'll make the rules.