Last year, Google showed off WaveNet, a new way of generating speech that didn't rely on a bulky library of word bits or cheap shortcuts that result in stilted speech. WaveNet used machine learning to build a voice sample by sample, and the results were, as I put it then, "eerily convincing." Previously bound to the lab, the tech has now been deployed in the latest version of Google Assistant. The general idea behind the tech was to recreate words and sentences not by coding grammatical and tonal rules manually, but allowing a machine learning system to see those patterns in speech and generate them sample by sample. A sample, in this case, being the tone generated every 1/16,000th of a second.