Thinking Deeply to Make Better Speech

A humanoid robot, named Aiko Chihira by its creators at Toshiba and Osaka University, at a 2015 trial in Tokyo's Mitsukoshi department store. Toshiba says it will incorporate speech recognition and synthesis into the robot by 2020. Machines that speak are nothing new. Siri has been answering questions from iPhone users since 2011, and text-to-voice programs have been around even longer. People with speaking disabilities--most famously, Stephen Hawking--have used computers to generate speech for decades.