Google's voice AI is more human than ever before

You might have watched a movie like The Terminator or I, Robot and considered that the artificial intelligence potential it portrays is a far cry from our current technologies (there's no real fear of bots powered by Samsung Bixby overtaking the planet, that's for sure). After investigating a recently published Google research paper (via Quartz), it looks like we might be closer to this reality than you might think. The paper, titled "Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions," highlights a new Google text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2, which is capable of a near-human level of AI voice reproduction. To achieve this, Tacotron 2 uses a pair of neural networks: one to create a visual representation of specific audio frequencies and a second (called "WaveNet") to recreate this visual data as sound. Google launched a website alongside the paper to show-off what this tech could lead to in practice; there, Google provides examples of how Tacotron 2 handles phrase semantics (like distinguishing between the noun and verb of "present"), intonation and difficult words that might trip some of us humans up like "otolaryngology."