philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Largest text-to-speech AI model yet shows ’emergent abilities’

Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits “emergent” qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally. The breakthrough could be what the technology needs to escape the uncanny valley. ...

Here are examples of tricky text mentioned in the paper:

• Compound nouns: The Beckhams decided to rent a charming stone-built quaint countryside holiday cottage.
• Emotions: “Oh my gosh! Are we really going to the Maldives? That’s unbelievable!” Jennie squealed, bouncing on her toes with uncontained glee.
• Foreign words: “Mr. Henry, renowned for his mise en place, orchestrated a seven-course meal, each dish a pièce de résistance.
• Paralinguistics (i.e. readable non-words): “Shh, Lucy, shhh, we mustn’t wake your baby brother,” Tom whispered, as they tiptoed past the nursery.
• Punctuations: She received an odd text from her brother: ’Emergency @ home; call ASAP! Mom & Dad are worried…#familymatters.’
• Questions: But the Brexit question remains: After all the trials and tribulations, will the ministers find the answers in time?
• Syntactic complexities: The movie that De Moya who was recently awarded the lifetime achievement award starred in 2022 was a box-office hit, despite the mixed reviews.

PhilNote: in text-to-voice it also produces natural inflections.

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/14/largest-text-to-speech-ai-model-yet-shows-emergent-abilities/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email