Collaborate Disseminate
There is a certain magic and uniqueness to hardware, particularly when it comes to audio. Tube amplifiers are well-known and well-loved by audio enthusiasts and musicians alike. However, that uniqueness also comes with the price of the fact that gear takes up space and cannot be configured outside the bounds …read more
Star Trek has its universal language translator and now researchers from Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) has developed a universal music translator. Much of it is based on Google’s WaveNet, a version of which was also used in the recently announced Google Duplex AI.
The inspiration for it came from the human ability to hear music played by any instrument and to then be able to whistle or hum it, thereby translating it from one instrument to another. This is something computers have had trouble doing well, until now. The researchers fed their translator a string quartet playing Haydn and …read more
First Google gradually improved its WaveNet text-to-speech neural network to the point where it sounds almost perfectly human. Then they introduced Smart Reply which suggests possible replies to your emails. So it’s no surprise that they’ve announced an enhancement for Google Assistant called Duplex which can have phone conversations for you.
What is surprising is how well it works, as you can hear below. The first is Duplex calling to book an appointment at a hair salon, and the second is it making reservation’s with a restaurant.
http://www.gstatic.com/b-g/DMS03IIQXU3TY2FD6DLPLOMBBBJ2CH188143148.mp3
http://www.gstatic.com/b-g/KOK4HAMTAPH5Z96154F6GKUM74A3Z1576269077.mp3
Note that this reverses the roles when talking to a computer …read more
Continue reading Google’s Duplex AI Has Conversation Indistinguishable From Human’s
Speech synthesis is nothing new, but it has gotten better lately. It is about to get even better thanks to DeepMind’s WaveNet project. The Alphabet (or is it Google?) project uses neural networks to analyze audio data and it learns to speak by example. Unlike other text-to-speech systems, WaveNet creates sound one sample at a time and affords surprisingly human-sounding results.
Before you rush to comment “Not a hack!” you should know we are seeing projects pop up on GitHub that use the technology. For example, there is a concrete implementation by [ibab]. [Tomlepaine] has an optimized version. In addition …read more
Speech synthesis is nothing new, but it has gotten better lately. It is about to get even better thanks to DeepMind’s WaveNet project. The Alphabet (or is it Google?) project uses neural networks to analyze audio data and it learns to speak by example. Unlike other text-to-speech systems, WaveNet creates sound one sample at a time and affords surprisingly human-sounding results.
Before you rush to comment “Not a hack!” you should know we are seeing projects pop up on GitHub that use the technology. For example, there is a concrete implementation by [ibab]. [Tomlepaine] has an optimized version. In addition …read more
Google’s WaveNet is bringing computerized speech into the uncanny valley. Continue reading Soon You Won’t Be Able to Tell an AI From a Human Voice
