Baidu's Deep Voice 2 Can Imitate a Human Voice

Baidu, the Beijing-based juggernaut that commands 80 percent of the Chinese internet search market, is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. In 2013, it opened the Institute of Deep Learning, an R&D center focused on machine learning. And in May, it took the wraps off the newest version of Deep Voice, its AI-powered text-to-speech engine.

Deep Voice 2, which follows on the heels of Deep Voice’s public debut earlier this year, can produce real-time speech that’s nearly indistinguishable from a human voice. All the more impressive, it needs just thirty minutes of audio to build a working model, and can imitate the regional accents of hundreds of different speakers.

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That’s leaps and bounds better than early versions of Deep Voice, which took multiple hours to learn one voice.

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They key is Deep Voice 2’s ability to identify similarities between hundreds of different speakers to build a working model of a human voice. Then, it autonomously derives unique voices from that model — unlike voice assistants like Apple’s Siri, which require that a human record thousands of hours of speech that engineers tune by hand, Deep Voice 2 doesn’t require guidance or manual intervention.

Baidu (sign) — Image used with permission by copyright holder

“Give it the right data, and it can learn on [its] own what sort of features are important,” Andrew Gibiansky, a research scientist at Baidu’s Silicon Valley AI Lab, told The Verge.

Baidu isn’t the only company investing in high-quality text-to-speech tech. Google’s WaveNet, a product of the company’s DeepMind division, generates voices by sampling real human speech and independently creating its own sounds in a variety of voices. Adobe’s Project VoCo transcribes human speech to editable text in real time. And Lyrebird, a Canadian AI startup, licenses algorithms that can imitate any voice with just a single minute of sample audio, create one thousand sentences in less than half a second, and can infuse the speech it creates with emotions like anger, sympathy, and stress.

But don’t expect Deep Voice 2 or WaveNet to replace Siri, the Google Assistant, or Amazon’s Alexa anytime soon — AI-powered translation apps require more resources than today’s phones can reasonably supply. But Baidu sees potential in applications like text-to-speech apps and voice-based assistants. “The ability to quickly synthesize multiple human voices will have a huge effect on products such as personal assistants and eBook readers in the future. For example, each character of your eBook could have a unique voice when you listen to the eBook.”