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Comment by yonkshi | Hacker News Reader

Google AI hadn't published any major papers on ASR or TTS since WaveNet, even the new WaveNet google demo'd a few months ago weren't even close to this demo's voices. The use of "Uh Huh" "Hmmm" are called back channeling, it's moon shot away given the current state of technology. It requires very low latency and precise timing so it doesn't cut the speaker off.

I believe if this demo were real, it was tested and cherry picked from a very particular environment

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They have published multiple major TTS papers since the original WaveNet paper in 2016. Including the recent Tacotron results with impressive style control.

Tacotron (Mar. 2017): https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.10135

Parallel WaveNet (Nov. 2017): https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10433

Tacotron again (Mar 2018): https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.09017

Tacotron 2 audio samples: https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/global_style_...

I immediately discounted the whole "Uh Huh" "Hmmm" thing as just a cheap psychological trick - a way to humanize the interaction without requiring much effort at all. As for the rest of it, I didn't necessarily tag it as fake but I did recognize that the act of making a reservation is a fairly structured process, requiring the exchange of a few critical pieces of information in a quick and efficient manner. But not necessarily something to be bowled over by, and no doubt something well-rehearsed in this case. Given the choice, though, I will generally always go online to take care of something like this rather than interact with a human anyway, since there's always the possibility that they will just screw it up on their end.

BTW, I have no particular reason to trust (nor distrust) anything Google says or does.

This is a long shot but, do you think it is at all possible that they've had some kind of a breakthrough using their quantum processing work, and are using that to accelerate machine learning models and produce much better quality generative speech? After hearing about Bristlecone I can't rule it out.

Why the downvote?!!?

That would be a monumental case of burying the lede...

Surely if they had that computing power they would just be breaking crypto and stealing money all day long?

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