It was found in a small mailbox, just west of a white house.

Originally shared by The Daily WTF

This is pretty amazing.

Via Emlyn O’Regan

Originally shared by Vincent Vanhoucke

File under ‘Big Deals’.

Neal Stephenson’s ‘The Diamond Age’ has a funky premise: in a future where technology had pretty much solved everything, one unsolved problem remains: generating human-sounding speech, and people called ‘ractors’ are hired to act out lectures delivered in spoken form.

For a while, it seemed actually believable that delivering human-sounding speech would be very hard, as synthesis technology consistently failed to deliver anything that would fool anyone for more than a few words.

Today the work from our colleagues at DeepMind feels like it’s leaped over the Uncanny Valley, and then some. The examples they provide sound fantastic. This is very exciting. I am really interested to hear what very long-form text sounds like, because that remains the ultimate challenge for TTS.

https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/