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Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

machinelearning.apple.com

11–20 of 95 posts

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#12
post #8

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.

ELIZA was already there.

Yeah, just 50 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#13
post #3

A 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.

Also glad to see this. Still curious as to why they wouldn't post it as a research paper on arXiv -- what's the point in reinventing the wheel here? I suppose it's nice for publicity, but would be great if they also played nicely with the ecosystem.

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#14
post #6
post #4

My favorite part is that the runtime runs on device. I moved back to Android, but persistently one thing Apple does that I like is they don't move things to the internet as often as Google does. On Android, you get degraded TTS if the internet is shoddy.

Their TV service does this too on Google Fiber. It sucks, it's a tire fire. It is laggy, wedges until you have to reboot the network and TV box. It's a horrible experience. I really wish they would stop trying to shove everything into the cloud. Seriously Google, STOP. JUST STOP!

Google's essentially a cloud company, any devices are just remote terminals. I doubt they'll ever change that.

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#17
The 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.

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#18
post #3

A 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.

Also glad to see this. Still curious as to why they wouldn't post it as a research paper on arXiv -- what's the point in reinventing the wheel here? I suppose it's nice for publicity, but would be great if they also played nicely with the ecosystem.

This was presented at Interspeech '17 this morning. Maybe the paper is embargoed or something until a later date?

Re: Deep Learning for Siri’s Voice

#19
post #5
post #3

A 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.

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.

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