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Researchers at Google DeepMind have released a paper (PDF) and writeup on their new "WaveNet" neural network. WaveNet is able to generate speech that arguably sounds far better than current text-to-speech (TTS) programs, and was also used to synthesize other audio, such as piano music.
We trained WaveNet using some of Google's TTS datasets so we could evaluate its performance. The following figure shows the quality of WaveNets on a scale from 1 to 5, compared with Google's current best TTS systems (parametric and concatenative), and with human speech using Mean Opinion Scores (MOS). MOS are a standard measure for subjective sound quality tests, and were obtained in blind tests with human subjects (from over 500 ratings on 100 test sentences). As we can see, WaveNets reduce the gap between the state of the art and human-level performance by over 50% for both US English and Mandarin Chinese.
For both Chinese and English, Google's current TTS systems are considered among the best worldwide, so improving on both with a single model is a major achievement.
There are multiple audio samples included on the writeup page.
Google-owned DeepMind has presented a neural network that can generate more convincing human speech, and other forms of audio such as classical music:
To bolster their claim, DeepMind released some samples, comparing their WaveNets with samples made by concatenate and parametric TTS. You be the judge.
Parametric: parametric-1.wav [and] parametric-2.wav
And now, this is what WaveNet generated: wavenet-1.wav [and] wavenet-2.wav
Daniel (UK) will live forever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @05:45AM
OK, dumbfuck, let me spell it out for you. Right now, Indians in call centers cold-call people and claim to be "Windows calling" and try to convince idiots to install malware on their computers. Convincing voice synthesis can remove the need for the living Indian person, and make cold-call malware scams even more profitable. And who is facilitating this process by improving voice synthesis to the point where you don't even need to hire humans to run phone scams anymore? GOOGLE. Are you getting the message, yet, moron??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @08:06AM
I think these samples must sound a bit too much like your ex-wife ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 12 2016, @08:40AM
Really? And there are people idiotic enough to fall for this?
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday September 12 2016, @12:51PM
The thing that makes this scam work so well is that they often do help with whatever problem the user says they're suffering from, they just install some malware as a side effect.
sudo mod me up