Speech, Voice, Accents and AI Free Thinking
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 4 March 2021
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From prejudice against accents to early attempts to create an artificial voice - Matthew Sweet is joined by the academics Sadie Ryan, Allison Koenecke and Lynda Clark.
Sadie Ryan hosts a podcast Accentricity and is part of the Manchester Voices project team https://www.manchestervoices.org/project-team/ You can find a New Thinking podcast episode looking in more detail at that project https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07h30hm
Lynda Clark is part of the InGAME (Innovation in Games and Media Enterprise) project at the University of Dundee. She's interested in interactive fiction and AI storytelling. She's been researching the experiments of Joseph Faber who created Euphonia in 1846 and created her own take working with games and digital experiences.
Allison Koenecke works in the Stanford University Computational Policy Lab and the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab
You might also be interested in these programmes from the Free Thinking archives - all available to download as BBC Arts & Ideas podcasts What is Speech? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b1q2f3 What is Good Listening? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000djtd The pros and cons of swearing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09c0r4m Language and Belonging https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006fh9 AI and creativity: what makes us human? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005nml Robots https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08chbpc
Producer: Luke Mulhall
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.2 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:37.2 | Hello, my name's Matthew Sweet and this is the Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:41.1 | I am an organic life form, and so are our guests, |
| 0:44.5 | but we'll be talking to them about how we speak to artificial intelligences |
| 0:48.6 | and how they talk back after this message. |
| 0:52.8 | With the BBC Sounds app, you can find some of your favourite shows with ease. |
| 0:58.3 | For example, you can tap the search button at the bottom right and type in Classical Fix. |
| 1:03.5 | This will take you straight to the podcast, where we aim to open up the incredible world of classical music to everyone. |
| 1:10.3 | Featuring some famous faces, including |
| 1:12.3 | the comedian James Acaster. Listen to it, it feels like all the grimes coming off you. |
| 1:17.4 | The musician, Nadine Shah. Right now I'm on some adventure. And many more. Download the BBC |
| 1:23.6 | Sounds app to start listening to Classical Fix and many other podcasts. |
| 1:33.6 | We've been talking to machines since at least the beginning of the industrial revolution, |
| 1:40.0 | cursing them, coaxing them, anthropomorphising them. Some machines talk back. The radio has been speaking to us for around a century in a variety of tones. How momentous that was, |
| 1:45.9 | the domestic space penetrated by the voices of people you didn't know, who weren't even there, |
| 1:52.1 | people who had to find a clear and friendly way of speaking to an entirely new entity, a national |
| 1:58.1 | live audience. And for decades, we dreamed of technology that could hear us |
| 2:03.3 | and answer back. Artificial intelligences with synthetic voices. Shall we hear some? I think we should. |
| 2:10.2 | Zen, run montage of talking sci-fi computer clips. Affirmative. So tell me, Zen, how does one |
... |
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