- Two Amazon scientists used artificial intelligence to create Alexa Irish.
- The team trained Alexa on accents produced by a text-to-speech model.
- This helped us identify the distinctive aspects of the Irish accent for training Alexa Ireland.
The two data scientists who created the Irish accent for Amazon’s Alexa say their artificial intelligence-powered text-to-speech system has changed the way their teams create different voice patterns and accents, according to a new feature on Amazon.com. . New York Times.
Scientists’ use of text-to-speech has exploded over the past year, with advances in how the generated speech sounds eerily similar to human speech, and how this technology is used in research, commercial, and personal settings. It’s just one example of how widespread it is. . Online users are now using AI audio to narrate audiobooks, cheat money, and narrate advertisements.
Georgi Tinchev and Marius KotescuDescribed by The Times as Irish brogues as “difficult to master,” they were tasked with creating accents for the Amazon using a technique of voice detangling.
Speech disentanglement means accurately identifying aspects of speech such as tone and intonation. Last year, Amazon scientists promote technology As a way to bring more diversity and inclusiveness to voice assistants.
In developing Irish English-speaking Alexa, released in November, hours of language training with the help of voice actors were condensed thanks to AI, data scientists told The Times. AI is now capable of mimicking regional dialects and accents in many languages. This helps to disentangle or identify certain characteristic aspects of accent.
Using an existing Alexa model that speaks with a British accent as a baseline, data scientists trained it with an Irish accent provided by text-to-speech models and voice recordings, The Times reported.
They then modified it by focusing on specific sounds, for example, emphasizing the ‘r’ sound in words like Irish, to finally create a voice that accompanies Alexa in Irish.