Google's WaveNet uses neural nets to generate eerily convincing speech and music

Generating speech from a piece of text is a common and important task undertaken by computers, but it's pretty rare that the result could be mistaken for ordinary speech. A new technique from researchers at Alphabet's DeepMind takes a completely different approach, producing speech and even music that sounds eerily like the real thing. Early systems used a large library of the parts of speech (phonemes and morphemes) and a large ruleset that described all the ways letters combined to produce those sounds. The pieces were joined, or concatenated, creating functional speech synthesis that can handle most words, albeit with unconvincing cadence and tone. WaveNet, as the system is called, takes things deeper.