Alexa and Siri, move over! There’s a new chatbot in town that can speak smooth as butter. Engineers at Amazon just built the BIGGEST text-to-speech model ever, packing in almost a billion parameters.
Dubbed BASE TTS, this vocal super-model is designed to read text aloud in uber-natural voices that sound creepily human. And with enough data pumping through its neural networks, BASE even picks up on linguistic complexities all on its own – no programming tricks needed!
See, text-to-speech models convert written words into talking sounds to power voice assistants like Alexa. The more sophisticated the model, the more realistically it can handle nuances like emphasis, intonation and mood when speaking.
Now Amazon’s beastly BASE TTS blows past models out of the water with 980 million parameters! It gulped down 100,000 hours of speech data during training too, letting it nail pronunciations in different languages.
Researchers found that around 150 million parameters, BASE suddenly got waaay better at using natural speech patterns. It intuitively paused at commas, changed tone for questions, even added some sass! Now that’s what scientists call “emergent ability” – locked away talents unleashed by data.
In tests, BASE smoothly tackled verbal obstacle courses full of complex words and winding sentences. It breezed through Spanish pronunciations better than British English ones though. Oops, needs a bit more Yorkshire pudding in its diet perhaps!
So should we be shocked if a amazingly articulate Alexa starts trash talking Siri someday? Well Amazon’s keeping mum about plans for BASE, wary of potential misuse of something so powerful. But the tech could let voice assistants sound almost indistinguishable from real peeps soon.
