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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 29 2017, @06:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the this-will-be-the-voice-of-skynet dept.

A research paper published by Google this month—which has not been peer reviewed—details a text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2, which claims near-human accuracy at imitating audio of a person speaking from text.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.

[...] Unlike some core AI research the company does, this technology is immediately useful to Google. WaveNet, first announced in 2016, is now used to generate the voice in Google Assistant. Once readied for production, Tacotron 2 could be an even more powerful addition to the service.

However, the system is only trained to mimic the one female voice; to speak like a male or different female, Google would need to train the system again.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday December 29 2017, @05:23PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday December 29 2017, @05:23PM (#615569) Journal

    It's pretty damn good compared to voice assistants that are in use or Daniel (UK) or whatever.

    Let's hope this can be used with stuff like Mycroft [mycroft.ai], Jasper [github.io], or Lucida [lucida.ai].

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @05:22AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 30 2017, @05:22AM (#615753)

    Nah, this will go for ELIZA.

    Or, for a few people hanging around here, DOCTOR.