Microsoft's New AI Can Generate Realistic Speech From Text With Very Little Training Data

This AI Can Generate Realistic Speech From Text Without Much Training, And It's Quite Scary

Text-to-speech engines have gotten pretty good over the years. They're now commonly used by streamers, and the differently-abled.

The problem is that they usually require quite a bit of training before they start to sound more natural in conversation.

speech AI

Now, Microsoft believes they have an easier way to achieve this. Alongside a group of Chinese researchers, they've built a text-to-speech AI that can generate realistic speech with just 200 voice samples and matching transcriptions. That's only about 20 minutes of training before its ready!

Their AI relies on something called Transformers, a specific architecture of neural network architecture that more closely resembles how neurons in the human brain function. They weigh every single input and output as the process is going on, similar to our own synaptic links, which let them better process even longer sequences.

What that essentially means is, the AI is better at processing a whole sentence at a time rather than words or phrases, meaning it can properly figure out on which word it should stress, without sounding staccato like previous text-to-speech engines.

speech AI

The results aren't perfect, it still sounds a little bit robotic. However, the AI is still a huge improvement over current modules, with a word intelligibility of 99.84 percent.

More importantly, because of how easy it is to train this AI, it could make efficient text-to-speech engines cheaper and more accessible for the people that need them.

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