Baidu's new text-to-speech system can master hundreds of accents

There is a renaissance happening in the world of artificial intelligence. Using deep learning, researchers are producing systems that can recognize objects, understand spoken language, and even simulate the human voice. The quality of these systems is advancing at a blistering pace. Just three months months ago, Chinese search giant Baidu showed off Deep Voice, a system for turning text into speech. It could produce speech which was nearly indistinguishable from an actual human voice on the first listen, and do it in near real time.