How Neural Networks Could Teach Computers To Talk Like Humans

It's hard to put your finger on why, but the voices our computers use to speak just sound wrong. Even with the best voice programming, like Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, computers sound--well--robotic when they talk. But that could change soon. Neural networks are now tackling the problem of making computer speech sound more natural, filling sentences with nonverbal sounds like lip smacks, breath intakes, and irregular pauses. DeepMind, an Alphabet-owned world leader in artificial intelligence research, recently published a blog post about WaveNet, a convolutional neural network (like DeepDream) that can reduce the performance gap between computer and human speech by about 50%, researchers say.