This AI System Lets Google Assistant Sound More Human

Thanks to Google and artificial intelligence (AI) research company, DeepMind, your phone will no longer sound like a robot when reading out or dictating requested information. Google Assistant is using an improved version of DeepMind's WaveNet, a deep neural network that can synthesize realistic human speech. WaveNet uses an improved system of speech synthesis or text-to-speech (TTS). In order to closely mimic human speech, concatenative TTS juxtaposes different parts of a voice actor's recordings to construct the desired sentence. Upgrading concatenative TTS is cumbersome as it involves replacing the audio libraries.