Skip to main content

Nvidia’s new voice A.I. sounds just like a real person

The “uncanny valley” is often used to describe artificial intelligence (A.I.) mimicking human behavior. But Nvidia’s new voice A.I. is much more realistic than anything we’ve ever heard before. Using a combination of A.I. and a human reference recording, the fake voice sounds almost identical to a real one.

All the Feels: NVIDIA Shares Expressive Speech Synthesis Research at Interspeech

In a video (above), Nvidia’s in-house creative team describes the process of achieving accurate voice synthesis. The team equates speech to music, featuring complex and nuanced rhythms, pitches, and timbres that aren’t easy to replicate. Nvidia is creating tools to reproduce these intricacies with A.I.

The company unveiled its latest advancements at Interspeech, which is a technical conference dedicated to research into speech processing technologies. Nvidia’s voice tools are available through the open-source NeMo toolkit, and they’re optimized to run on Nvidia GPUs (according to Nvidia, of course).

The A.I. voice isn’t just a demo, either. Nvidia has transitioned to an A.I. narrator for its I Am A.I. video series, which shows the impacts of machine learning across various industries. Now, Nvidia is able to an artificial voice as a narrator, free of the usual audio artifacts that come along with synthesized voices.

Nvidia tackles A.I. voices in one of two ways. The first is to train a text-to-speech model on a speech given by a human. After enough training, the model can take any text input and convert it into speech. The other method is voice conversion. In this case, the program uses an audio file of a human speaking and converts the voice to an A.I. one, matching the pattern and intonation.

For practical applications, Nvidia points to the countless virtual assistants helming customer service lines, as well as the ones present in smart devices like Alexa and Google Assistant. Nvidia says this technology reaches much further, however. “Text-to-speech can be used in gaming, to aid individuals with vocal disabilities or to help users translate between languages in their own voice,” Nvidia’s blog post reads.

Nvidia is developing a knack for tricking people using A.I. The company recently went into detail about how it created a virtual CEO for its GPU Technology Conference, aided in part by its own Omniverse software.

Editors' Recommendations

Jacob Roach
Senior Staff Writer, Computing
Jacob Roach is a writer covering computing and gaming at Digital Trends. After realizing Crysis wouldn't run on a laptop, he…
Oops — Nvidia has just accidentally revealed a brand new GPU
MSI RTX 4080 Suprim X installed in a PC.

Nvidia's RTX 4070 is reportedly right around the corner, but the chipmaker is yet to release any official announcement about the new GPU. It still managed to confirm its existence in a stealthy way.

The latest addition to Nvidia's lineup of the best graphics cards appeared in a slide that shows off Nvidia Reflex. The technology is coming to Counter-Strike 2, and the RTX 4070 is most likely coming to various retailers in just a few days. Did Nvidia really intend to reveal it in such a low-key way?

Read more
I switched to an AMD GPU for a month — here’s why I don’t miss Nvidia
RX 7900 XTX slotted into a test bench.

AMD's RX 7900 XTX currently tops Digital Trends' list of the best graphics cards. But there's more to a GPU than just performance testing and benchmarks, and some of those things can't be discovered until you live with a piece of tech day in and day out.

So, I figured it was high time to put my proverbial money where my mouth is by using AMD's card every day in my own PC. And a month later, I'm happy to report that aside from some minor hiccups, I don't miss Nvidia as much as I thought I would.
4K flagship performance

Read more
It feels like Nvidia is gaslighting us with this ‘new’ GPU
Nvidia's Jeff Fisher presenting its CES 2023 keynote.

Nvidia announced a "new" GPU dubbed the RTX 4070 Ti via its broadcast ahead of CES 2023. Why the quotations around "new," you ask?

Well, it's not a new GPU at all actually, but you'd never know it by the way Nvidia GeForce head Jeff Fisher just talked about it. If you weren't paying close attention to tech media news for the past few months, you'd think this was Nvidia's fourth GPU in the new RTX 40-series -- but no. It's just a new name for a product that was announced last year, and then quickly retracted.

Read more