DeepMind’s use of neural networks to synthesize speech could finally make computers sound more human.
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 2329
Google has announced WaveNet, a speech synthesis program that uses AI and deep learning techniques to generate speech samples better than current technologies. By analyzing samples 16,000 a second, it can generate human-like speech and even its own music compositions.
If you’ve ever been lost in the maze of Youtube videos you may have stumbled on clips of computers reading news articles. You’d recognize that staccato, robotic nature of the voice. We’ve come a long way from “Danger! Will Robinson!,” but it there is yet to be a computer that can seamlessly mimic a human voice.
Now, there’s a new contender, brought to you by the brilliant minds behind DeepMind. Google has announced a new voice synthesis program in WaveNet, powered by deep neural AI.
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“Apple started looking seriously into building an electric car about two years ago. It expanded the project quickly, poaching experts in battery technology and so-called machine vision, as well as veterans from the automobile industry.”
Google’s DeepMind unit, which is working to develop super-intelligent computers, has created a system for machine-generated speech that it says outperforms existing technology by 50 percent.
U.K.-based DeepMind, which Google acquired for about 400 million pounds ($533 million) in 2014, developed an artificial intelligence called WaveNet that can mimic human speech by learning how to form the individual sound waves a human voice creates, it said in a blog post Friday. In blind tests for U.S. English and Mandarin Chinese, human listeners found WaveNet-generated speech sounded more natural than that created with any of Google’s existing text-to-speech programs, which are based on different technologies. WaveNet still underperformed recordings of actual human speech.
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Worried that AI’s one day could make us their pets Elon Musk is teasing a new brain-hacking tech
There’s no doubting that Elon Musk is one busy guy. Whether he’s trying to land on Mars with SpaceX, running Tesla, buying SolarCity, investing in the future of AI, building Giga factories or throwing out Hyperloop concepts for fun but it’s increasingly apparent that he’s giving a huge amount of thought to the day when advanced AI’s become the most intelligent form of “life” on the planet.
With the advances that we are already seeing in AI it’s inevitable that one day – sooner rather than later humans will, comparatively speaking, be as intelligent to an AI as pets are to us today. To that end, the billionaire polymath has revealed he may be working on something called a “Neural Lace”, a nanotechnology based device that you can think of as being a digital upgrade for your brain. Human intelligence combined with the power of AI – a digital layer directly overlaid onto the brains cortex.
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Now this, this will accelerate AI autonomous capabilities. However, still should be done with a QC secured infrastructure.
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s research agency has a new challenge for scientists: make wireless radios with artificial intelligence that can figure out the most effective, efficient way to use the radio frequency spectrum, and win a pile of cash.
Winners of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) could take home up to $3.5 million, but to do that, teams will have to demonstrate new technologies that represent a “paradigm shift” with both military and commercial applications, said Paul Tilghman, a DARPA program manager who is leading the challenge.
“The real crux of the problem is — when you look at users of the spectrum, whether they are commercial users of the spectrum, whether they’re consumers or they’re the military — the thing that is ubiquitously true is we all are placing more and more and more demand on the spectrum, and all of that demand is really adding up.
Advanced warfare platforms are increasingly using unused spectrum, now the Pentagon needs a system to cripple it
The US military is cultivating new electronic warfare technologies that, in real time, use artificial intelligence to learn how to jam enemy systems that are using never-before-seen frequencies and waveforms.
Although this “cognitive electronic warfare” is still in its nascent stages of development, scientists developing these systems told Defense News the technology could appear on the battlefield within the next decade.
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Growing up in Generation AI
Posted in computing, economics, robotics/AI
Imagine a five-year-old watching Mum talking to Siri, and Dad talking to Alexa, on a daily basis — what must she think of such interactions? Children nowadays witness computers that seem like they have a mind of their own — and even a personality with which to engage. It can be taken for granted that their perception of machines, and thus of the world itself, differs a lot from our own.
Artificial intelligence is one of the most promising areas of tech today, if not even the one that is likely to entail the most striking changes in our way of living, the way our economy works and how society functions. Thanks to enormous amounts of data, coupled with compute power to analyze it, technology companies are making strides in AI that resembles something of a gold rush.
New approaches, including use of deep neural networks, have led to groundbreaking achievements in AI, some of which weren’t predicted to happen for another decade. Google defeating the world champion at the ancient game of Go is just one prominent example. Many more are to be expected, including advances in deep learning combined with reasoning and planning — or even emulating creativity and artwork.
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Elon Musk has recently hinted that he may be working on a “neural lace,” a mesh of electronics that will allow AI and the brain to work together. This could help human brains keep up with future enhancements in AI.
There’s no doubt that Elon Musk is one busy individual. When not playing on the Tesla factory floor, he may be bringing electric roofs to electric vehicles, or dreaming up the Hyperloop, or toying with the future of AI.
If not any of those, he is apparently busy protecting us from being treated like house pets after the Singularity. To that end, the billionaire polymath has revealed he may be working on something called a “neural lace.”
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The conjunction of Venus and Jupiter just before dawn over the southeastern Caspian sea. Credit: Babak A. Tafreshi (TWAN) http://twanight.org/
Aside from the attention it receives around one of its rare solar transits, Venus hardly makes headlines.
But before our warming sun turned Venus into a poster child for the dangers of a runaway greenhouse, our closest planetary neighbor may have once had oceans capable of harboring complex life.
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