Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Mon, 19 Nov 2012 17:00:00 PST Michael Ho http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101025/05063611567/dailydirt-computers-to-talk-us.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101025/05063611567/dailydirt-computers-to-talk-us.shtml

Most people usually think of synthetic speech software sounding like a HAL9000 or Gene Roddenberry's wife, so there's been a notable dearth of synthetic kid's voices. Until now. Meet Harry and Rosie -- a couple text-to-speech voices that sound like British children. [url]

The Blizzard Challenge is an annual competition for taking a limited speech database and building a synthetic voice from it in order to learn more about how algorithms can be improved for speech synthesis. Someday, these results will actually make some Mission Impossible tricks seem plausible. [url]

A new smartphone app can translate spoken words in real time from Japanese to English (or Mandarin or Korean) and vice versa. This app doesn't do much for grammar, but it can get across some meaning even though it's not perfect. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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