It's also interesting how they made the pitch higher for the new voice, like Google has had all along.
Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
61–70 of 95 posts
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, they do seem to be opening up a bit. They posted their first article on this ML blog a few weeks ago.
It's a quite unattractive proposition for ML researchers to work for a company without being able to publish. I'm guessing Apple simply had to make this change in order to stay in the game.
There was a lot of internal pushing for publication, apparently. But Apple decided they don't want individual engineers to get credits for ML work that whole teams are working on, so they came up with their ML blog to post papers without individual credit. At least, that's how it was explained by some of the ML researchers to this year's summer intern class.
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#63A 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.
You can read some more discussion on it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14804018.
One of the ideas is that most ML researchers want to publish their work and Apple wasn't allowing it. Allowing ML researchers working at Apple to publish in this journal was they only way they were get more ML researchers to work for them.
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because then it wouldn't be an Apple™ iNovation™.
Let's be honest, these people's names aren't displayed prominently for precisely the same reason as early Atari game developers names weren't.
I'm not familiar with this example. Could you elaborate on the Atari thing, please?
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#65Good 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.
The paper is here: http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/Interspeech_2017/abstract...
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#66I couldn't read the paper yet, and also I know very little about this, but listening to the audio samples it seems that one of the most notable changes was the intonation in changing phrases. Did anyone else catch something like that? I'm not sure I'm doing a good job at explaining. If you listen to all iOS11 samples it'll stand out. Anyway, it's the only way I can still identify this as a fake voice. The intonation…
Regarding voice acting, I think there is something to be said about human expression/ad-lib. Sure, you could generate a natural-sounding voice computer voice, but in the context of arts we’re still a ways to go before a computer can go off script and add just the perfect amount of intonation on a certain word that turns a phrase into an iconic quote.
Similarly, we don’t see CGI motion capture replacing Andy Serkis any time soon.
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#67The obvious question would be a head-to-head qualitative comparison vs. WaveNet. It seems that they have advanced siri vs. siri prior, but does this work advance the field?
in terms of being feasible to actually use in production? Yes. It runs realtime locally on a mobile device at 48khz 16bit. WaveNet doesn't run realtime even on a desktop GPU at 16khz 8bit.
The WaveNet method of predicting the output sample by sample yields great results but at a very high computational cost
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#68The iOS 11 Siri sounds like it's a real person talking, it's amazing. Does anyone know if there's an open-source TTS library available with such quality (or if anyone is working on one, from this paper)? I would love to have my home speakers announce things in this voice.
I'd love to have my Instapaper articles read to me in that TTS voice. Hopefully it gets ported to MacOS's say CLI utility. I typically use that with `pbpaste | say` to read my articles.
I would assume that the OS X TTS engine is the same as Siri's as it would be available in High Sierra.
Is the one in Sierra different from Siri in iOS 10?
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#69This just made me realize that every time you see a strong AI in fiction, it still has a computer-sounding voice. If we ever develop strong AI, we will probably already have perfectly natural speech synthesis. And if not, the AI could develop it for us. But I suppose an AI might choose to use a computer-sounding voice to remind us that it is a computer. Kind of like those inaccurate sound effects in movies - they hav…
I recommend watching the scifi film "Her", it has a different take on this.
That was a great movie.
There is always the chance that as we get better at this stuff we'll start to find it creepy that it's so realistic (either due to the uncanny valley or because we crossed the valley) and we'll start to prefer devices that act robotic even though we know we could make the indistinguishable.
I'm trying to think of another example. I know I've heard a good one with Roombas but I can't remember it.
Basically we may try to avoid a Bladerunner situation where we're not sure when we are or aren't talking to a real person and prefer the 'computery' voices.
Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's be honest, these people's names aren't displayed prominently for precisely the same reason as early Atari game developers names weren't.
I'm not familiar with this example. Could you elaborate on the Atari thing, please?
Atari wanted people to want Atari games, not Frank Jones games. They considered their programmers replaceable cogs and refused to give them credit.
That's why the Easter egg in Adventure with the programmer's name exists. It was the only way to get his name out there.
What happened was the developers didn't like this and left to start their own company, Activision, which made some of the best remembered games on the 2600.
Apple already 'compromised' by letting their researchers publish at all. Maybe names will be allowed in the future but it's kind of surprising we're even getting this.