Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence has figured out how to talk

Google DeepMind claims to have significantly improved computer-generated speech with its AI technology, paving the way forward for sophisticated talking machines like those seen in sci-fi films like "Her" and "Ex-Machina." The London-based research lab, acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported 400 million, announced on Thursday that it has developed a talking computer programme called "WaveNet" that halves the quality gap that currently exists between human speech and computer speech. Although WaveNet sounds more like a human voice than existing artificial voice generators -- known as "text-to-speech" (TTS) systems -- it requires too much computing power to make it practical, meaning Google won't be integrating it into its products any time soon, according to The Financial Times. Aäron van den Oord, a research scientist, at DeepMind said: "Mimicking realistic speech has always been a major challenge, with state-of-the-art systems, composed of a complicated and long pipeline of modules, still lagging behind real human speech. Our research shows that not only can neural networks learn how to generate speech, but they can already close the gap with human performance by over 50%.