>New speech software can make you say words you never spoke
>
> By Lisa Guernsey
> NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
>
> AT&T Labs will start selling speech software that it says is so good
> at reproducing the human voice that it can re-create voices and even
> bring the voices of long-dead celebrities back to life.
>
> 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.
>
> The software, called Natural Voices, is not flawless. There are still
> a few robotic tones and unnatural inflections. But some who have
> tested the technology say it is the first such product likely to
> replicate a human voice where the human ear cannot tell the
> difference.
>
> 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
> voice-activiated devices.
>
> Scientists say the technology is not yet good enough to perpetrate
> fraud.
>
> To build the software that re-creates voices -- AT&T Labs is calling
> the product its ``custom-voice'' product -- a person must first go to
> a studio and record 10 hours to 40 hours of readings. The recordings
> are then chopped into fragments of sounds and sorted into databases.
> When the software processes a text, it retrieves the sounds and
> assembles them to form new sentences.
>
> In the case of long-dead celebrities, archival recordings could be
> used in the same way.
>
> Others, including IBM Research and Lernout and Hauspie, are also
> experimenting with the technique. It is a big step up, engineers say,
> from the speech engines built from whole words that had been
> pre-recorded. And it is also a vast improvement, some say, from the
> computer-generated product used in many versions of text-to-speech
> software today.
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