New AI Tech Can Mimic Any Voice

Montreal-based start-up Lyrebird is looking to change that with an artificially intelligent system that learns to mimic a person's voice by analyzing speech recordings and the corresponding text transcripts as well as identifying the relationships between them. Introduced last week, Lyrebird's speech synthesis can generate thousands of sentences per second--significantly faster than existing methods--and mimic just about any voice, an advancement that raises ethical questions about how the technology might be used and misused. The ability to generate natural-sounding speech has long been a core challenge for computer programs that transform text into spoken words. Artificial intelligence (AI) personal assistants such as Siri, Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and the Google Assistant all use text-to-speech software to create a more convenient interface with their users. Those systems work by cobbling together words and phrases from prerecorded files of one particular voice.