Archive for Speech/Spoken
AI-aided text-to-speech
Vocal fry and dismissing young women’s voices
dd { margin-bottom: 20px; } I was completely oblivious to the vocal fry/“creaky voice” phenomenon until today. A friend posted about it, and I did a quick search, and...
Daisy: 50 years of song synthesis
I got curious about why HAL 9000 sings “Daisy” (actual song title: “Daisy Bell) in 2001. It turns out that it's because Arthur C. Clarke saw a 1962 Bell Labs...
Rum, hobbitses, and the Kirk
A few weeks back, N introduced me to the catchy video remix "Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain; why is he climbing a mountain?" It does a neat job of...
Wreck an icing’s beach again
Back in the late '90s, I wrote a column on computer speech recognition. The state of the art has progressed somewhat since then. One of the new uses for the...