谷歌旗下DeepMind在语音生成领域取得突破

Google’s DeepMind division has claimed a big leap forward in producing computer-generated speech, potentially bringing forward the day when machines sound as natural as humans.

谷歌(Google)旗下的DeepMind称，在计算机语音生成领域取得巨大飞跃。这一技术进步可能会令机器像人一样自然发声的一天提前到来。

Researchers at the UK-based artificial intelligence arm said tests of their system with human listeners, though unavoidably subjective, had shown that the technology halves the quality gap that exists between today’s computer systems and human speech.

这家总部驻英国的人工智能分公司的研究人员表示，由人类听众对其系统的测试（尽管这种测试不可避免地带有主观性）显示，该技术将目前计算机系统与人类说话间存在的质量差距缩小了一半。

One person familiar with the research said the system, called WaveNet, was not being employed in any of Google’s products yet, and that the massive computing power it needed to generate speech made it impractical for real world use for the foreseeable future.

一位知情人士表示，这一名叫WaveNet的系统尚未被用于谷歌任何产品。该技术在生成语音时需要极大的运算能力，令它在可以预期的未来无法实际运用到真实世界。

The research that led to WaveNet, along with a number of samples of speech generated by the system, was published online on Thursday.

周四，WaveNet的相关研究以及一系列该系统生成的语音样本被发布到网上。