Google's DeepMind Gives Robots A Scary-Accurate New Voice

A new artificial neural network is setting high watermarks in the field of speech synthesis and giving robots a voice eerily similar to that of humans.

- Aaron Krumins

Whatever you may think of the robotic voices foisted upon the world thanks to Google Voice Search and Siri, you’re unlikely to mistake them for human voices. The state of the art in computer speech synthesis has been stuck at a fairly low level. But new software called WaveNet, from the brainiacs at DeepMind, is setting a high watermark in the field of speech synthesis and giving AI a voice eerily similar to that of a human.

For years, robotics experts have spoken about something called the “uncanny valley”—the creepy feeling one gets when observing a robot that is too mechanistic to be mistaken for a human but not quite mechanical enough to be distinctly robotic.