Exercise 22: IVONA Speech SynthesisOctober 13, 2008
SummaryWrite a class that will connect to the Expressivo application via TCP port 17024 and send a
"SayIt|..." command.
SolutionClick hereIVO and Cepstral voicesOctober 13, 2008
During the last few weeks the best text-to-speech systems that I've come across are
Cepstral and
IVONA. They both have impressive products at the right price ($30-$49), so I've purchased the Jennifer voice from IVONA and the Allison voice from Cepstral to play with. It's nice to see companies working on this problem and offering their services at very affordable prices.
"Nearly" passing the Turing Test?October 13, 2008
http://gizmodo.com/5062385/computer-nearly-passes-turing-test-for-artificial-intelligenceToday I realized just how "gray" the Turing Test really is. I've been aware for some time that a man by the name of Hugh Loebner set up an official Turing Test, but I didn't realize it would be
this easy for developers to use smoke-and-mirror techniques to score well on it. It's all a little disappointing, really.
If I were to define a Turing Test, it would involve producing a machine that attained something like a 90% fool rate after sessions with 10 highly trained interrogators which each asked the machine 100 questions. It's the "highly trained interrogators" that is key here.
For example, I can guarantee you that none of the machines tested this weekend would have even a small hope of answering a statement/question such as this:
Question: "I'm thinking of something that is big and round and 6 billion people live on it. What am I thinking of?"
Trained interrogators would ask simple questions such as this, and today, the machines would likely score 0% on a series of 100 questions and attain a 0% fool rate. And that, I think, would demonstrate where we're at!
On the other hand, I think it's good to have a contest that allows the current state of the art to show off and gives researchers something manageable to work towards. But I wish they wouldn't call it the Turing Test, and then start talking about sentient life forms... please...
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