I think there is a bit of a hype, and people specifically try to deemphasize any relation to AI promises. IMHO, many things that were once associated with stati

I think there is a bit of a hype, and people specifically try to deemphasize any relation to AI promises. IMHO, many things that were once associated with statistics are now rather referred to as machine learning, and the range of applications tends to become very broad. One could refer to the unsupervised adaptation of new HMM-based speech synthesis (HTS) voices as a promising machine learning application. It's not a success story, but imagine being able to create new synthesis voices given only a few minutes of speech by any person. Want to try out how well that works? Go to [1] and select the voice "GWB (HTS 2007)", and enter any english text you want. Sounds familiar? And that's just an academic demo page... [1] http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jyamagis/demos/page35/page35.html http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jyamagis/demos/page35/page35.h...