I'm amazed at the speed and pace of technological advancements being made by the world's top scientists and computer engineers. In this article I will explain why artificial intelligence is moving beyond recognition and that fact is demonstrated by the latest progress with Google's voice generating AI.
What if Steem and the largest social networking site platform that sits on top of it, Steemit were able to integrate this technology before other companies jump on board?
Imagine if there was a speaker button next to this post and it could be read to you and sound just as natural as if I was reading it to you myself... There's some food for thought right?
Cryptocurrencies are still in their infancy and the Steem and SBD cryptocurrencies stand to benefit a lot from additional exposure through networking and partnerships. Doesn't this seem like a good application for increased integration with the business world?
This idea could get us some amazing press if developers got in the train quickly with this one. If anyone knows how I could get in contact with the developers of Steem and Steemit and pitch this idea to them myself, please let me know!
Anyways lets dig deeper into the Tacotron and let me try to explain why it is such a groundbreaking advancement of modern text to speech AI functionality!
If you've ever used Google products you may be familiar with Google's AI voice. There are two settings, one for male and one for female voice and when you hear it you'll know something is majorly off with unnatural pronunciation similar to that of Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana.
But every year the unnatural sound that computer generated voices make is becoming less recognizable and now you'll simply be amazed as Google's voice has started to sound less robotic and more like a human and in fact, the new Tacotron 2 Google voice AI is almost undistinguishable from a human voice.
In a recently published research paper by the people at Google, the team introduces details to the impressive speech system called Tacotron 2. In the paper, Google highlights the systems ability to speak almost identically to its human creators.
The team describes the second generation speech system in the report stating, " The Tacotron 2, a neural network architecture for speech synthesis directly from text. The system is composed of a recurrent sequence-to-sequence feature prediction network that maps character embeddings to mel-scale spectrograms, followed by a modified WaveNet model acting as a vocoder to synthesize timedomain waveforms from those spectrograms."
According to the report the technology that powers this new text to speech tool consists of two deep neural networks. Basically, the way it works is that the first network translates the text into a spectrogram. After the spectrogram has been made it is sent to WaveNet, a new system specially designed by Google's Deep Mind AI program. The process results in a computer generated voice that sounds like its human counterparts.
Take a listen of Google's new Tacotron for yourself and you may just be surprised how natural it sounds!
Techblogger Wrap Up
This technology is miles ahead of Siri or Amazon's Alexa. The fact that its almost undistinguishable from a real human's voice is concerning to say the least.. Don't you think Steem / Steemit could benefit from being a first mover in the integration of this new technology into their platforms?
Do you think because of this new natural sounding AI text to speech voice capabilities, we may find ourselves become the victim of some sort of AI scam down the road? What types of positive applications and nefarious use can you imagine being conducted through the assistance of this new technology?
Please leave your thoughts and comments below.
Source:
Google's New Voice AI is Hyper Realistic - Interesting Engineering
Image Source:
Interesting Engineering