Google's AI sounds more human than you, even when it's speaking nonsense

Where Google is moving towards lifelike AI, Hiroshi Ishiguro's Alter is moving towards embracing the inhuman. Google's AI can dream up its own surreal images, conversation, and beat a human champion at the ancient game of Go. Now it can realistically mimic human speech, including the non-speech sounds the mouth and respiratory system make when a human talks. The system is called WaveNet, a neural network that generates raw audio waveforms, and it's uncannily lifelike. We do have text-to-speech generators, and they're very useful, particularly for blind people.