The promise of AI in audio processing – Towards Data Science

We have seen a rise of AI technologies for image and video processing. Even though things tend to take a little while longer making it to the world of audio, here we have also seen impressive technological advances. In this article, I will summarize some of these advances, outline further potentials of AI in audio processing as well as describe some of the possible pitfalls and challenges we might encounter in pursuing this cause. The kicker for my interest in AI use cases for audio processing was the publication of Google Deepmind's "WaveNet" -- A deep learning model for generating audio recordings [1] which was released during the end of 2016. Using an adapted network architecture, a dilated convolutional neural network, Deepmind researchers succeeded in generating very convincing text-to-speech and some interesting music-like recordings trained from classical piano recordings.