Google Deepmind develops most realistic sounding AI yet

While subtle, one of the biggest advances portrayed in movies like Her or Ex Machina was that the AI began to really sound like a fellow human. And in the realm of real-life tech, Google's AI focus in recent years has similarly been to make computers sound more like us. The latest development to come out of Google's Deepmind AI is called WaveNet and it samples different parts of human speech and models its own waveforms after the way they sound. It's not perfect yet, but we're definitely getting closer to voices that sound like they come from a person's mouth, rather than from a computer's speaker. While it still sounds strange, the new AI speech certainly flows better than the kinds of responses you'll get from Siri or Cortana, which chop up human speech and paste it back together in a way that makes individual pronunciations correct, but the flow of the speech is completely off.