If half your work day is spent thinking up ways to troll and annoy your co-workers, today’s going to be an easy one. Neil Thapen’s Pink Trombone is a browser-based speech synthesizer that lets you manipulate a simulated mouth, throat, tongue, and nasal cavity to create a remarkably realistic—and equally annoying—human…
Amazon recently announced that the Alexa AI powering its Echo and other hardware has now learned 1,000 “skills” (up from just 135 in January). In case you’re not up to speed with all the new tricks, we’ve picked out 40 of our favorites—you can discover the other 960 yourself.
Siri making a meal of your boyfriend’s name? Or is it just not getting the right amount of twang in when trying to say the name of the local cab firm? If you think Siri’s pronunciation skills leave something to be desired then you can retrain the app yourself in just a few minutes—here’s how to go about it.
Google’s artificial intelligence is getting speedily (and worryingly?) better, as its recent slam-dunk of a human Go champion demonstrated. That victory required highly computationally-efficient AI rather than just brute force, something Google thinks could help it move speech recognition offline.
The first-ever working vocal cords able to produce realistic sound have been grown from scratch in a lab, promising hope to people who have lost their voice due to illness, injury or invasive surgery.
One of the coolest new Windows 10 features is talking to your computer. For many people, it’ll be the first time they’ve had a voice-activated personal assistant on tap. And yet, most computers won’t have Cortana turned on by default—allegedly because they don’t have certified high-quality microphones built-in.
Google Voice has an incredibly useful function that provides you with a transcribed version of your voicemail—but if often gets things wrong. Now, Google is throwing neural networks at the problem to help improve its performance dramatically.
Unless you’re one of the handful of people rocking a Windows Phone, you won’t have much experience with Cortana, Microsoft’s personal digital assistant. With the roll-out of Windows 10, Cortana is about to make a lot of new friends very quickly—and like me, they might soon find themselves shouting instructions at…
All of Toshiba’s new laptops will let you summon Windows 10’s Cortana voice assistant with a dedicated keyboard key. Expect other manufacturers to follow suit. On Xbox One, you’ll need a Kinect to use Cortana.
Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate.
There is a lot of intriguing music streaming in the feed of the São Paulo, Brazil–based musician who identifies as Asvfuks on the SoundCloud service (and on Instagram, among other places). The track “A Divisão Do João,” by way of example, seems to be based on a snatch of music by João Gilberto, the bossa nova great…
Blessed with the calming voice of a warm blanket on a cold night, Morgan Freeman is basically the best narrator for nearly every documentary and most life situations. I could listen him talk about anything and it would feel important. But what about Morgan Freeman on helium? How's that sound? Hilarious.
Here's a good deed you can do without parting with a single thing. Synthetic voices for people who have lost the ability to speak only come in generic types—think of Stephen Hawking's voice—but one fascinating project wants to build custom voices for each person. To do that they need your help: specifically, a…
Listen to super talented voice actor Brock Baker zip through 33 different Simpsons impressions in 5 minutes. His Homer takes a little getting used to but he nails a good chunk of them. There are a few that are pitch perfect (like his Fat Tony). Anyway, it all adds up to a very fun watch.
Disquiet Junto Project 0110: WSB100
Imagine being able to hear a great historical figure's voice. It would add such richness to the facts and dates about her or his life. Starting today, Wikipedia will make that possible with the Wikipedia Voice Intro Project, adding short voice recordings to the online encyclopedia. And that's truly awesome.
Molly Berg contributes varied breathy, glottal vocalizations in her collaborations with Stephen Vitiello. There is the sound she emits from her vocal cords, and the sound that she makes with her clarinet. Both can veer into an etheral, heavenly zone, or can settle in a more tactile, percussive space. The combination…
Siri has provided iPhone users around the planet with everything from weather forecasts to restaurant reviews, whilst fending off dumb-ass questions along the way. But if you ever wondered who whispered all those sweet nothings, here's your answer.
If you've ever listened to a recording of yourself and thought you sound completely different, you're not alone. But more than that, you were also correct. Here's why it sounds different.
People who have been blind since a young age can sometimes learn to develop a sort of low-grade echolocation. This technique, used by the likes of Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Ronnie Milsap, and Ben Underwood, works much the same way as it does in bats and dolphins. But people who have just recently lost their sight…
