AI & RoboticsNews

IBM’s AI generates high-quality voices from 5 minutes of talking

September 30, 2019
Training powerful text to speech models requires sufficiently powerful hardware. A recent study published by OpenAI drives the point home — it found that since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest runs grew by more than 300,000 times. In pursuit of less demanding models, researchers at IBM developed a new lightweight and modular method for speech synthesis. They say it’s able to…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Google’s highly scalable AI can generate convincingly humanlike speech

September 30, 2019
A generative adversarial network (GAN) is a versatile AI architecture type that’s exceptionally well-suited to synthesizing images, videos, and text from limited data. But it’s not much been applied to the audio production domain owing to a number of design challenges, which is why Google and Imperial College London researchers set out to create a GAN-based text-to-speech system capable of…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Google Assistant is now available for most Chromebooks

September 29, 2019
Google has started rolling out Chrome OS 77, and it makes Assistant widely available to the devices the platform powers. The voice AI used to be a Pixel exclusive, though adventurous users have been able to switch it on as a hidden feature for a while if they’re in one of Chrome OS’ beta channels. The platform’s latest version makes Assistant available “on most…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Google’s robotic hand AI can learn to rotate Baoding balls with minimal training data

September 27, 2019
Using several fingers at once to grasp and manipulate objects is a straightforward ask of humans, despite the primitiveness of our hand anatomy. But robots have a much tougher go of it. That’s because tasks like writing on paper with a pencil require physics models directing the imparting of forces onto the target object, as well as the repeated establishing and breaking of contacts. And with…
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