Artificial Intelligence Is Now Shockingly Good At Sounding Human

Synthetic voices have become ubiquitous. They feed us directions in the morning, shepherd us through phone calls by day, and broadcast the news on smart speakers at night. And as the technology used to make them improves, these voices are becoming more and more human-sounding. This is the final frontier in synthetic speech: replicating not just what we say, but how we say it. Rupal Patel heads a research group at Northeastern University that studies speech prosody--the changes in pitch, loudness and duration that we use to convey intent and emotion through voice.