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A few years ago, I noticed that train companies in Japan had started using synthesized voices for some announcements on trains and at stations. (Probably the sa
by tkgally 5y ago
A few years ago, I noticed that train companies in Japan had started using synthesized voices for some announcements on trains and at stations. (Probably the same thing is happening in other places, but I haven't travelled outside Japan for a long time.) The voices were clearly artificial and sometimes made ridiculous mistakes—such as reading the name of the train company JR East in English as “junior east”—but over time I realized that they also had advantages over prerecorded human voices.
Once, I was riding a two-car local train through a rural part of Kyushu when the train was delayed by heavy rain up ahead. Soon there were audio announcements with artificial voices about the delay in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean. Both the Japanese and English sounded a bit strange—the English especially because it was clearly machine translated—but the meaning was clear and they served their purpose. (I couldn't assess the Chinese or Korean.)
The pitch of the artificial voices must have been chosen for good audibility in a noisy environment, as they were easier to understand than most live announcements by human conductors on trains.
Professional human voice actors certainly would have been better, but there is no way they could have been arranged at a reasonable cost for up-to-the-minute train delay announcements in even one language, let alone four.
- ijidak 5y agoWow. That's a very good use case I would never have thought of. It's those unexpected use cases that often become the killer app of advancements like this.
- swiley 5y agoI'm pretty sure Amtrak/VRE in the US uses synthesized voices at some stations, the one at RVR sounds almost exactly like GLaDOS.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ArnoVW 5y agoI had the same sort of situation the other day. I wanted to produce a "corporate video" for our company that explained our ontology, and it's benefits. Using Blender I managed to come to a semi-pro result, but getting the narrating voice was not quite so easy. I didn't have access to a good mic, and my French / Dutch accent would have distracted and lowered the production value. In my opnioning this is a good example of how AI is slowly gaining foot. It's a bit like the old adage of a camera phone vs a DSLR. Sure, it's inferior, but it's always better than a superior version that I don't have access to. It's difficult to compete on quality with something that's free.
- tkgally 5y ago> it's inferior, but it's always better than a superior version that I don't have access to. Yes. Machine translation is like that, too. It makes mistakes and can be hard to understand and easily misunderstood, but compared with the time and effort required to learn another language, or the expense and bother of finding a human translator or interpreter, it clearly has its advantages.