WaveNet: Micro-Managing the Way to Realistic Synthesised Speech

Net with cool lighting
Photo by Pietro Jeng.

A year ago, a new speech synthesis system called WaveNet was presented by Google’s DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company.  As its name suggests, WaveNet generates speech by using neural networks to predict what the sound wave of a sentence should look like.  I thought this was interesting because it’s such a counterintuitive way to produce speech sounds.

WaveNet in Action

 

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