Google claims its machine can now 'speak like a human'

Google has revealed a new text-to-speech system that could soon allow AI voice assistants to sound far more natural. The tool, called Tacotron 2, was trained on examples of human dialogue and text transcripts to generate more realistic speech. A demonstration of the system reveals how it can smoothly read different texts aloud without skipping a beat, including the'Peter Piper' tongue-twister – but, it's still tripped up by difficult words. Google has revealed a new text-to-speech system that could soon allow AI voice assistants to sound far more natural. The tool, called Tacotron 2, was trained on examples of human dialogue and text transcripts to generate more realistic speech. Tacotron 2 uses what's known as a sequence-to-sequence model, which maps out letters to features that encode the audio.