Synced Baidu AI Can Clone Your Voice in Seconds

Baidu's research arm announced yesterday that its 2017 text-to-speech (TTS) system Deep Voice has learned how to imitate a person's voice using a mere three seconds of voice sample data. The technique, known as voice cloning, could be used to personalize virtual assistants such as Apple's Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa; and Baidu's Mandarin virtual assistant platform DuerOS, which supports 50 million devices in China with human-machine conversational interfaces. In healthcare, voice cloning has helped patients who lost their voices by building a duplicate. Voice cloning may even find traction in the entertainment industry and in social media as a tool for satirists. Baidu researchers implemented two approaches: speaker adaption and speaker encoding.