Technology
Amazon’s Alexa gets news anchor speaking voice, The Verge reports
-
Amazon has developed a new voice for its AI-assistant
Alexa which sounds more like a news anchor,
The Verge reports. -
It did this by training neural text-to-speech
technology on audio recordings of real newsreaders to pick up
on their inflections and nuances. -
The result is still a little robotic, but recognisably
more like a newsreader than Alexa’s standard voice.
Amazon has been working on a new voice for Alexa to make it sound
more like a news anchor, which it says customers prefer when
listening to the AI-assistant reading out headlines.
The Verge reports that Amazon developed this new voice by
combining neural text-to-speech technology (or NTTS) with
recording audio clips from real newscasters.
Here’s Alexa regular voice, reading an article about the
Grand Central terminal opening in San Francisco:
Listen here to Amazon’s NTTS-trained newsreader
voice:
The result is still somewhat robotic, but includes some of the
inflections often used by newsreaders.
Trevor Wood, who oversees the application of AI in text-to-speech
at Amazon, told The Verge: “It’s difficult to describe these
nuances precisely in words, and a data-driven approach can
discover and generalize these more efficiently than a human.”
Amazon said it only required a few hours of data to teach Alexa
to talk like a newscaster. It will be launching the new voice on
enabled devices in a few weeks’ time.
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