Mrs Helen Harper, of Jamaica, New York, had an unusual ability — she could play the human voice with her fingers.

It was 1939, and the world’s first electronic speech synthesiser had just been invented at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.  The Voder, as it was named, … Read the rest

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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

In this … Read the rest

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