- AT&T Labs will start selling speech software that
it says is so good at reproducing the sounds, inflections and intonations
of a human voice that it can re-create voices and even bring the voices
of long-dead celebrities back to life.
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- The software, which turns printed text into synthesized
speech, makes it possible for a company to use recordings of a person's
voice to utter new things that the person never said.
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- The software, called Natural Voices, is not flawless
-- its utterances still contain a few robotic tones and unnatural inflections
-- and competitors question whether the software is a substantial step
up from existing products. But some of those who have tested the technology
say it is the first text-to-speech software to raise the specter of voice
cloning, replicating a person's voice so perfectly that the human ear cannot
tell the difference.
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- ``If ABC wanted to use Regis Philbin's voice for all
of its automated customer-service calls, it could,'' said Lawrence R. Rabiner,
vice president for AT&T Labs Research.
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- Potential customers for the software, which is priced
in the thousands of dollars, include telephone call centers, companies
that make software that reads digital files aloud and makers of automated
voice devices.
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- James R. Fruchterman, the chief executive of Benetech,
a non-profit organization that uses technology in social-service projects,
tested the software along with a dozen people who evaluate technology for
blind people, and they said they were impressed.
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- ``Natural Voices gets into the gray area,'' he said,
``where there is plausible deniability that it is a machine.''
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- Rabiner said he is excited about the possibility of resurrecting
renowned voices, like that of Harry Caray, the Chicago Cubs announcer who
delivered rousing play-by-play broadcasts. ``There are probably hours of
recordings in archives,'' he said. Wouldn't it be great, he asked, if Harry
Caray's voice could once again be broadcasting in Wrigley Field?
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- Ownership issues
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- The technology raises several questions. Who, for example,
owns the rights to a celebrity's voice? Rabiner predicted that new contracts
will be drawn that include voice-licensing clauses.
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- With computer-generated characters already appearing
in place of real ones in some movies, will computer-synthesized voices
compete with those of live actors as well?
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- And although scientists say the technology is not yet
good enough to perpetrate fraud, synthesized voices may eventually be capable
of tricking people into thinking that they were getting phone calls from
people they know.
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- For now, technical limitations may temper any worries
that a person's voice could be lifted without permission.
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- To build the software that re-creates unique voices --
which AT&T Labs is calling its ``custom voice'' product -- a person
must first go to a studio where engineers record 10 hours to 40 hours of
readings. Texts range from business news reports to nonsense babble. The
recordings are then chopped into fragments of sounds and sorted into databases.
When the software processes a text, it retrieves the sounds and re-assembles
them to form new sentences.
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- Gains in synthetic speech
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- In the case of long-dead celebrities, archival recordings
could be used in the same way.
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- Other companies and research centers, like IBM Research
and Lernout and Hauspie, are also experimenting with this technique --
which is called concatenative speech synthesis -- to improve the quality
of text-to-speech software. It is a big step up, engineers say, from the
speech engines that were built from whole words that had been pre-recorded.
And it is also a vast improvement, some say, from the entirely computer-generated
and therefore robotic sounds that are used in many versions of text-to-speech
software on the market today.
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- Now aided by the declining cost and increasing speed
of microprocessors, far smoother sentences are possible, Rabiner said.
He said that the speech team at AT&T Labs, led by Juergen Schroeter,
an expert in speech synthesis, had created a more refined form of the concatenative
technique by breaking a person's voice into ``the smallest number of units
possible.''
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- A demonstration of the technology will be available on
the Web beginning today at www.naturalvoices.att.com, said Michael Dickman,
a spokesman for AT&T Labs.
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- Still, many engineers are skeptical of claims of a completely
simulated voice that is almost indistinguishable from that of a human.
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- Now the pressure is on to perfect the technology. Analysts
at McKinsey & Co. have predicted that the market for text-to-speech
software will reach more than $1 billion in the next five years. In addition
to customers like call centers and manufacturers of automated voice systems,
the software could also be used by publishers of video games and books-on-tape
and automobile manufacturers whose cars are equipped with software that
gives driving directions. In the near future, engineers have said they
expect people will want high-end speech technology that enables them to
interact at length with their cell phones and Palm organizers, instead
of typing on and squintingat a tiny screen.
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