Facebook's AI system can speak with Bill Gates's voice

The slow progress on realistic text-to-speech systems is not from lack of trying. Numerous teams have attempted to train deep-learning algorithms to reproduce real speech patterns using large databases of audio. The problem with this approach, say Vasquez and Lewis, is with the type of data. Until now, most work has focused on audio waveform recordings. These show how the amplitude of sound changes over time, with each second of recorded audio consisting of tens of thousands of time steps.