Why making AI sound human is a bad idea - TechRepublic

From Facebook to Amazon to Microsoft to Apple, big tech companies are racing to improve speech-synthesis systems. And the systems, which have become increasingly realistic-sounding, have a lot of potential benefits--from serving the blind, to helping people who are illiterate access information online, to assisting the elderly. TechRepublic spoke to Alan Black, a Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researcher who studies speech-synthesis systems. Black explained what's new in voice-recognition, the current challenges, and what we should be concerned about. What is the current technology behind speech-recognition?