How AI researchers built a neural network that learns to speak in just a few hours

Text-to-speech systems are familiar in the modern world in navigation apps, talking clocks, telephone answering systems, and so on. Traditionally these have been created by recording a large database of speech from a single individual and then recombining the utterances to make new phrases. The problem with these systems is that it is difficult to switch to a new speaker or change the emphasis in their words without recording an entirely new database. So computer scientists have been working on another approach. Their goal is to synthesize speech in real time from scratch as it is required.