Google's DeepMind Pays Off With AI That Mimics Human Speech

There are many speech generation programs that create artificial human speech such as Minitalk and eSpeak, but Google believes they have a system that outperforms current technology by 50%. Deepmind is a Google unit that is working on super-intelligent computers and they've created an artificial intelligence that can closely mimic human speech. The AI, called WaveNet, works by analyzing a human voice's actual sound waves. More archaic speech generators either use short clips of a previously recorded speaker or electronically generate speech based on how certain letter combinations are supposed to be pronounced. The results of both provide highly accurate speech, but they sound robotic and lack the fluidity of human diction.