It is likely that we will see any phone voice assistants with naturally sounding voices until they can consistently be as natural as the voice showed in the Google assistant calling demonstration and cross the infamous "uncanny valley", a valley at which a technology generates an imperfect human and causes discomfort in users despite being close to the real thing. The obvious benefit that most people might think of is better sounding voice assistants, but companies so far have not decided to use better voice synthesis on voice assistants with research showing that it can draw users away by coming off as eerily human. The fact that you can train artificial intelligence to synthesise voice as natural as this with just 5 minutes of training data comes with both benefits and potential problems. For example, Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony has the option of outputting the written text in a happy mode. Additionally, depending on the characters chosen on the website, the web platform allows you to give an emotion to the narration of the sample text. Though it is still a bit rough around the edges (try inputting "coronavirus" and listen to different characters absolutely butcher the pronunciation), the AI does a good job at accurately replicating most basic words. Fifteen, on the other hand, highlights a very different improvement in voice synthesising algorithms: it is able to produce samples of audio similar to that of the original character in as little as 5 minutes of training data. There is no doubt that in order to make such an intricate AI, days upon days of training data was used by Google to hone the voice assistant into answering in the most natural way possible.
The voice assistant goes as far to include "um"s and "hmm"s in its replies, undoubtedly fooling the caller on the other end into thinking there is an actual human on the other side. The feature allows the voice assistant to call and make appointments for you and also respond to calls first if needed. The most famous example of this is an unreleased feature of Google's voice assistant. However, due to the recent innovations in the field of artificial intelligence, the quality of text to speech engines has seen rapid growth and the voices generated are increasingly natural. Text to speech is a technology has been around for a while now, being part of many operating systems since as early as the 1990s.
0 kommentar(er)
