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Amazon is Teaching Alexa To Speak Like a Newscaster (theverge.com) 49

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
The way newscasters speak is unmistakeable, with their exaggerated modulations and drawn-out pauses. And now, Amazon has taught Alexa, its voice assistant, to approximate the authoritative intonation. From a report: You can listen to samples of the speaking style here, and the results, well, they speak for themselves. The voice can't be mistaken for a human, but it does incorporates stresses into sentences in the same way you'd expect from a TV or radio newscaster. According to Amazon's own surveys, users prefer it to Alexa's regular speaking style when listening to articles (though getting news from smart speakers still has lots of other problems).

Amazon says the new speaking style is enabled by by the company's development of "neural text-to-speech" technology or NTTS. This is the next generation of speech synthesis, that use machine learning to generate expressive voices more quickly. Currently, Alexa uses concatenative speech synthesis, a method that's been around for decades. This involves breaking up speech samples into distinct sounds (known as phonemes) and then stitching them back together to form new words and sentences.
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Amazon is Teaching Alexa To Speak Like a Newscaster

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  • What they really need to do is giver her one of those awesome mid-atlantic accents from 1920s radio. This would be awesome as like in the 20s this seeped in to popular culture and people actually started speaking this way. Can you imagine a generation of kids brought up speaking all old-timey?
  • Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] (2 min 35 sec)
  • how to badger left wing candidates for sound bites [google.com] they can later use against them and read the same script of right wing talking points [youtube.com]

    Yeah, I know, off topic. But maybe not. If we can replace the few honest news anchors left with robots that parrot the party line then it'll be establishment propaganda 24/7. Heck, they'll have to make it 25/8 just to fit all that nonsense in. And it's not like they can't change it, since they'll make the rules.

  • Don't we get enough of that from the political elites?

  • Paul Harvey please. Thank you.

  • Get it to say "I'm Ron Burgundy?"

  • ... sound like an authentic national newscaster until it completely miss pronounces Puyallup.

  • Please no! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @06:24PM (#57682368) Journal
    I've seen US news reports. The newscasters spend all their time telling you what is coming up later and then when later arrives they spend most of it telling you what is coming up tomorrow. The actual content is about 30 seconds of information which they almost apologise for having to include and which they rush through to make sure they have enough time to tell you what is coming up after the break.

  • Teaching it how to lie and only give opinions - no facts.

  • "exaggerated modulations and drawn-out pauses"

    in the USA, yes. In Europe, we find this to be unnatural, irritating, even ridiculous. We do not want to be hectored at high volume from the TV, we want to be informed in a measured and evenly-spoken fashion.

    So Alexa is optimising for just one market's cultural communication preferences - a typical internationalisation failure by a large corporation.

  • So basically they are teaching it to lie, and push whatever narrative the establishment wants them to push?

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