Google has plunged high towards its'AI-first' dream. The tech giant has attempted to develop a Text-to-speech system that has exactly human-like articulation. This AI system is called "Tacotron 2" that has the ability to give an AI-generated computer speech in a human-voice. Google researchers mentioned in the blog post that the new procedure does not utitilise complex linguistic and acoustic features as input. In place of it, they developed human-like speech from text using neural networks trained using only speech examples and corresponding text transcript. Google's CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company will be shifting its focus from mobile-first to AI-first at the Google I/O 2017 developers conference.

Can you tell the difference between AI-generated computer speech and a real, live human being? Maybe you've always thought you could. Maybe you're fond of Alexa and Siri but believe you would never confuse either of them with an actual woman. Things are about to get a lot more interesting. Google engineers have been hard at work creating a text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2. According to a paper they published this month, the system first creates a spectrogram of the text, a visual representation of how the speech should sound.

In a major step towards its "AI first" dream, Google has developed a text-to-speech artificial intelligence (AI) system that will confuse you with its human-like articulation. The tech giant's text-to-speech system called "Tacotron 2" delivers an AI-generated computer speech that almost matches with the voice of humans, technology news website Inc.com reported. At Google I/O 2017 developers conference, company's Indian-origin CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the internet giant was shifting its focus from mobile-first to "AI first" and launched several products and features, including Google Lens, Smart Reply for Gmail and Google Assistant for iPhone. According to a paper published in arXiv.org, the system first creates a spectrogram of the text, a visual representation of how the speech should sound. That image is put through Google's existing WaveNet algorithm, which uses the image and brings AI closer than ever to indiscernibly mimicking human speech.

Can you tell the difference between AI-generated computer speech and a real, live human being? Maybe you've always thought you could. Maybe you're fond of Alexa and Siri but believe you would never confuse either of them with an actual woman. Things are about to get a lot more interesting. Google engineers have been hard at work creating a text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2. According to a paper they published this month, the system first creates a spectrogram of the text, a visual representation of how the speech should sound.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have demonstrated a new way to fool computer vision algorithms that enable artificial intelligence systems to see. The researchers exploited the Google Cloud Vision API that enables anyone to perform image labeling, face and landmark detection, optical character recognition, and tagging of explicit content. Traditional hacking approaches are inefficient and impractical when targeting large images with tens of thousands of pixels. To overcome this problem, the MIT team adapted a "natural evolution strategies" method that generates smaller populations of images around the larger image, with large random groups of pixels being perturbed instead of single pixels. Then, given the classifier's output on these randomly perturbed images, the system recovers what the contribution of each individual pixel is to the classification output, according to MIT researcher Andrew Ilyas.

Get ready for the little person living inside your phone and speaker to sound a lot more life-like. Google believes it has reached a new milestone in the quest to make computer-generated speech indistinguishable from human speech with Tacotron 2, a system that trains neural networks to generate eerily natural-sounding speech from text, and they have the samples to prove it. In a research paper published earlier this month, though yet to be peer-reviewed, Google asserts that previous approaches to text-to-speech (TTS) systems have thus far failed to achieve a genuinely natural sound. Techniques such as concatenative synthesis, in which pre-recorded samples of speech are stitched together, and statistical parametric speech synthesis, Google says have been insufficient, explaining, "The audio produced by these systems often sounds muffled and unnatural compared to human speech." With Tacotron 2 (which is not the same as the world-ending super-weapon used by Lord Business), the company says it has incorporated ideas from its previous TTS systems, WaveNet and the first Tacotron, to reach a new level of fidelity.

I go to learn about and discuss all things wealthTech, and every year we see the bandwagon steer towards the same trends. This year especially – though certainly true of the last few years – we seem to have latched on to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). I see demos of some really cool technology. The question begs to be asked: is there really something here? Or, is this all sizzle and no steak?

There is not one but many definitions of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and its scope remains fluid and evolving. Some people even state that AI is everything that has not yet been done, referring to the observation that as the tools we use daily become increasingly sophisticated, tasks previously considered as requiring'intelligence' are now considered routine and get excluded from the AI definition. Think for example of a good spam filter, spell check or optical character recognition, all of which used to be considered revolutionary, but today don't impress people anymore. 'A constellation of technologies that extend human capabilities by sensing, comprehending, acting and learning – allowing people to do much more.' In other words, we put the focus on the ability of AI to complement and empower people instead of replace them. Therein lies the key: If you only look at AI from the perspective of a technology that'can do it all', it will fail and create problems within organizations and society.

WIRE)--Veritone, Inc. (NASDAQ:VERI), a leading provider of artificial intelligence (AI) insights and cognitive solutions, today announced the general availability of its Veritone Developer application. The application empowers developers of cognitive engines, applications and application programming interfaces (APIs) to bring new AI ideas to life through simple integration with the Veritone aiWARE platform. Veritone Developer is a self-service development environment that empowers developers to create, submit and deploy public and private applications and cognitive engines directly into the aiWARE architecture. After a successful limited-beta-release to a select group of partners, Veritone Developer is now publicly available as a unique resource for machine learning experts, application development firms, and system integrators. Veritone Developer supports RESTful and GraphQL API integrations as well as engine development in major categories of cognition, including: transcription, translation, face and object recognition, audio/video fingerprinting, optical character recognition (OCR), geolocation, transcoding, and logo recognition.

Snap a pic of a document, whiteboard, receipt or business card, and it'll be immediately digitized onto your device. Printed and handwritten text is automatically and accurately recognized using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tech.