Siri's voice sounds more human in iOS 11 because of AI

I remember my roommate, way back in 1986, laboriously stringing together phonemes with Apple's Macintalk software to get his Mac to utter a few sentences. It was pioneering at the time -- anybody else remember the Talking Moose's jokes? But boy, have things improved since then. Publishing a new round of papers on its new machine learning journal, Apple showed off how its AI technology has improved the voice of its Siri digital assistant. To hear how the voice has improved from iOS 9 to iOS 10 to the forthcoming iOS 11, check the samples at the end of the paper.