Reporter Chloe Veltman reacts to hearing her digital voice double, “Chloney,” for the first time, with Speech Morphing chief linguist Mark Seligman.
Courtesy of Speech Morphing
hide caption
toggle caption
Courtesy of Speech Morphing
Reporter Chloe Veltman reacts to hearing her digital voice double, “Chloney,” for the first time, with Speech Morphing chief linguist Mark Seligman.
Courtesy of Speech Morphing
The science behind making machines talk just like humans is very complex, because our speech patterns are so nuanced.
“The voice is not easy to grasp,” says Klaus Scherer, emeritus professor of the psychology of emotion at the University of Geneva. “To analyze the voice really requires quite a lot of knowledge about acoustics, vocal mechanisms and physiological aspects. So it is necessarily interdisciplinary, and quite demanding in terms of what you need to master in order to do anything of consequence.”
So it’s not surprisingly taken well over 200 years for synthetic voices to get from the first speaking machine, invented by Wolfgang von Kempelen around 1800 – a boxlike contraption that used bellows, pipes and a rubber mouth and nose to simulate a few recognizably human utterances, like mama and papa – to a Samuel L. Jackson voice clone delivering the weather report on Alexa today.
A model replica of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Speaking Machine.
Fabian Brackhane
hide caption
toggle caption
Fabian Brackhane
A model replica of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Speaking Machine.
Fabian Brackhane
Talking machines like Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa, or a bank’s automated customer service line, are now sounding quite human. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, or AI, we’ve reached a point where it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish synthetic voices from real ones.
I wanted to find out what’s involved in the process at the customer end. So I approached San Francisco