Folium: Microsoft Can Make Your Voice Speak Foreign Languages via Gizmodo.com
Folium: Microsoft Can Make Your Voice Speak Foreign Languages via Gizmodo.com
Folium: Microsoft Can Make Your Voice Speak Foreign Languages via Gizmodo.com
Have you ever wondered what your own voice sounds like? Have you ever taken a tape recorder, recorded yourself, then immediately said “eww, that’s how I sound to other people?” Yeah, I thought so. Well, take that idea and apply it to different languages! Have you ever wondered what you sound like in fluent Spanish, French, or even Chinese?
Engineers at Microsoft have created a voice program that takes the pitches and tones of your voice and applies them to the new vowel and consonant sounds from languages around the world.
That model is converted into one able to read out text in another language by comparing it with a stock text-to-speech model for the target language. Individual sounds used by the first model to build up words using a person’s voice in his or her own language are carefully tweaked to give the new text-to-speech model a full ability to sound out phrases in the second language.
The voice is still in the “kind-of-robotic” phase, but the idea of speaking into your phone and have the translation come out in your own voice is a pretty cool idea. Hit up the link to Gizmodo to listen to some samples, and see the MIT link for more information.
