Tag: Text-to-speech

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The Enhancement of Bixby

The Korean company Samsung Electronics announced new updates to its voice assistant Bixby that are designed to improve user experience, performance, and capabilities of the intelligent assistant and platform. One of the most interesting innovations concerns the voice of the users. According to Samsung, they “can personalize their Bixby Text Call voice”. “Using the new Bixby Custom Voice Creator, users can record different sentences for Bixby to analyze and create an AI generated copy of their voice and tone. Currently available in Korean, this generated voice is planned to be compatible with other Samsung apps beyond phone calls” (Samsung, 22 February 2023). As early as 2017, Oliver Bendel wrote with respect to Adobe VoCo: “Today, just a few minutes of samples are enough to be able to imitate a speaker convincingly in all kinds of statements.” In his article “The synthetization of human voices”, published in AI & Society, he also made ethical considerations. Now there seems to be a recognized market for such applications and they are being rolled out more widely.

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Swiss Space Days 2020

The Swiss Space Days offer – according to the responsible persons – a platform to exchange experiences and to support cooperation. It is possible to listen to prominent speakers involving ESA directors, representatives of Swiss companies and of the Large European System Integrators. “A high level panel is closing the morning session of the first day. In the afternoon of the first Day, a session will cater to the needs of companies and a parallel session will address the interests of the scientific community. The second day is dedicated to space applications and downstream services using Earth Observation, Telecom and/or Navigation data. A panel with representatives of institutional programmes and of user companies will conclude the Swiss Space Days …” (Website Swiss Space Days) On the marketplace there are several offers and requests for partnerships and research cooperations, for example regarding IGLUNA (“IGLUNA is a platform gathering students from all around the world to demonstrate innovative space technologies”) and the voicebot SPACE THEA (“SPACE THEA is designed to accompany astronauts to Mars and to show them empathy and emotions.”). More information via ssd2020.b2match.io.

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Speaking with Harmony

There is great media interest in the new book “Maschinenliebe” (ed. Oliver Bendel), which was published in October 2020. Several review copies were sent out. The title means “Machine Love”, “Machines for Love” or “Machines of Love”. Three contributions are in English. One of them – “Speaking with Harmony: Finding the right thing to do or say … while in bed (or anywhere else)” – is by Kino Coursey (Realbotix). From the abstract: “Doing or saying the right thing in response to circumstances is a constant problem, especially for embodied personal companions like Realbotix’s Harmony. In this paper we will describe the Harmony system, how it finds the right thing to say or do, and how recent advances in neural network-based natural language processing and generation will be integrated into next-generation systems. These advances will allow the transition from pattern-oriented responses to dynamic narrative-oriented response generation. Future systems will be able adapt to their situation much more flexibly, and allow a wider range of role-playing and interaction.” More information via www.springer.com/de/book/9783658298630.