I saw two clips, which I think was such demonstrations. Both reeked of desperation, one was a dude talking with a synthesised voice imitating a young, overly pl

I saw two clips, which I think was such demonstrations. Both reeked of desperation, one was a dude talking with a synthesised voice imitating a young, overly pleasing woman, the other used the same voice for a pretty weird trivial translation between english and italian. Machine translation is quite old by now, and for practical uses you'd want speech to translated text so it doesn't interrupt conversation like in the demonstration. Sure, I can imagine people with a lot of spare time and few or no friends might want to substitute with a machine, and that they might feel that this has a magic to it. Magical here meaning roughly the same as it does when applied to Disney-land or similar entertainment simulacra.