The speed in which voice technology is developing is both exciting and worrying - at least if you're a brand trying to keep up with developments and trying to figure out how you can make the most of it.
Voice mimicry within one minute is a bit of a gimmick yet it is a demonstration of how fast the technology can be, which in turn with other uses could make the difference between a consumer feeling comfortable with a brand or not.
Researchers at Chinese search giant Baidu have created an artificial intelligence they claim can learn to accurately mimic your voice — based on less than a minute’s worth of listening to it.
Baidu Research isn’t the first to try and create voice-replicating AI. There's a project called Lyrebird, which uses neural networks to replicate voices including President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama with a relatively small number of samples.
Like Lyrebird’s work, Baidu’s speech synthesis technology doesn’t sound completely convincing, but it’s an impressive step forward — and way ahead of a lot of the robotic AI voice assistants that existed just a few years ago.