deepvoice

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  • Jason Lee / Reuters

    Baidu’s text-to-speech system mimics a variety of accents ‘perfectly'

    by 
    Timothy J. Seppala
    Timothy J. Seppala
    05.25.2017

    Chinese tech giant Baidu's text-to-speech system, Deep Voice, is making a lot of progress toward sounding more human. The latest news about the tech are audio samples showcasing its ability to accurately portray differences in regional accents. The company says that the new version, aptly named Deep Voice 2, has been able to "learn from hundreds of unique voices from less than a half an hour of data per speaker, while achieving high audio quality." That's compared to the 20 hours hours of training it took to get similar results from the previous iteration, for a single voice, further pushing its efficiency past Google's WaveNet in a few months time.

  • Getty Images

    Baidu's Deep Voice can quickly synthesize realistic human speech

    by 
    Mariella Moon
    Mariella Moon
    03.09.2017

    Baidu has been quietly working on other projects besides self-driving cars at its AI center in Silicon Valley, and now it has revealed one of them to MIT's Technology Review. Apparently, the Chinese tech titan has created a text-to-speech system called Deep Voice that's faster and more efficient than Google's WaveNet. The company says Deep Voice can be trained to speak in just a few hours with little to no human interaction. And since Baidu can control how it speaks to convey different emotions, it can (quickly) synthesize speech that sounds pretty natural and realistic.