Good blog post and audio samples notwithstanding, annoying that they don't put the paper on Arxiv. As they themselves point to in the blog post, the learning architecture was introduced in 2014's "Deep mixture density networks for acoustic modeling in statistical parametric speech synthesis" so it's not clear how much of this is just good engineering vs novel research.
Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
31–40 of 95 posts
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#32It might seem silly, but I'm looking forward to the first AI talk therapist. Most of the benefit of therapy is the talking, so it's not as crazy as it sounds.
At my little company, iCouch, we have experimented with such things, but to actually make it effective — that requires a good amount of capital — capital that is very difficult to raise. I would need to hire 3 full time people just for the AI project and potentially more. The VC world is interested in “traction” and not novel tech which means we have to divert effort into growing customers for our mental health pract…
I've looked into this space as a second project, in collaboration with psychologists and pyschiatrists at a teaching institution with a dedicated, well funded institute for similar work.
The biggest challenge I saw was gaining the trust of sufficient therapists and patients and then an IRB. If you've solved those problems and can actually demonstrate data collection and a computational workflow with any evidence of results whatsoever, I suspect money would not be a problem.
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#33Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, just 50 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
Now we only need to attach some TTS to it!
You can try a version of it on your Echo device through this Alexa skill:
https://www.amazon.com/Asimov-Eliza/dp/B0184NR4P8
Not sure what their stance on privacy is though.
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#35It might seem silly, but I'm looking forward to the first AI talk therapist. Most of the benefit of therapy is the talking, so it's not as crazy as it sounds.
> It might seem silly, but I'm looking forward to the first AI talk therapist. Most of the benefit of therapy is the talking, so it's not as crazy as it sounds.
Not crazy at all. At least some therapies provide benefits even with simple non-AI processes: "A meta-analyses of 15 studies, published in this month’s volume of Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, found no significant difference in the treatment outcomes for patients who saw a therapist and those who followed a self-help book or online program."[0]
[0] https://qz.com/1057345/researchers-say-you-might-as-well-be-...
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#36The prosody and and continuity of the speech is dramatically improved. This is hard to do and very impressive (especially given that it is being done on-device).
Personally, I'm less pleased with the actual new voice itself, although that is more a subjective judgment. After listening to many hundreds of voice talent auditions for Alexa, it's hard to step back from that level of pickiness.
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#37Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#38Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#39A research paper published by Apple? About Siri?! Unheard of! Last time I was at an NLP conference wth Apple employees they wouldn't say anything about how Siri speech worked, despite being very inquisitive about everyone else's publications. Good to see some change.
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Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#40Now if only it didn't feel like when I'm asking Siri to do a task it has a very small pool of pre-set options I get to choose from. It still feels rather restricted, but I'm excited they're really investing into it.