An Interest In:
Web News this Week
- April 25, 2024
- April 24, 2024
- April 23, 2024
- April 22, 2024
- April 21, 2024
- April 20, 2024
- April 19, 2024
November 21, 2018 08:10 pm
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/qOkiwev1izM/amazon-is-teaching-alexa-to-speak-like-a-newscaster
Amazon is Teaching Alexa To Speak Like a Newscaster
The way newscasters speak is unmistakeable, with their exaggerated modulations and drawn-out pauses. And now, Amazon has taught Alexa, its voice assistant, to approximate the authoritative intonation. From a report: You can listen to samples of the speaking style here, and the results, well, they speak for themselves. The voice can't be mistaken for a human, but it does incorporates stresses into sentences in the same way you'd expect from a TV or radio newscaster. According to Amazon's own surveys, users prefer it to Alexa's regular speaking style when listening to articles (though getting news from smart speakers still has lots of other problems). Amazon says the new speaking style is enabled by by the company's development of "neural text-to-speech" technology or NTTS. This is the next generation of speech synthesis, that use machine learning to generate expressive voices more quickly. Currently, Alexa uses concatenative speech synthesis, a method that's been around for decades. This involves breaking up speech samples into distinct sounds (known as phonemes) and then stitching them back together to form new words and sentences.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/qOkiwev1izM/amazon-is-teaching-alexa-to-speak-like-a-newscaster
Share this article:
Tweet
View Full Article
Slashdot
Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..More About this Source Visit Slashdot