Google Breaks Ground With Best Artificial Intelligence Speech Generator Yet

The DeepMind unit, which Google bought in 2014 for roughly 533 million, develops supercomputers and artificial intelligence (AI). One of the AI programs DeepMind has developed is Wavenet, designed to mimic human speech. In blind tests human listeners indicated that Wavenet was the most natural sounding text-to-speech (TTS) program, after hearing samples from different programs in English and Mandarin Chinese. TTS programs continue to struggle to sound like natural speech, and Wavenet, while increasingly similar, does not yet sound just like actual human speech. Wavenet simulates certain brain functions by using what in artificial intelligence is called a "neural network."