Playing with #AI

So, been spending a lot of time recently around many things related to Artificial Intelligence (#AI).  More on that some day. :)

Was curious about yesterdays Amazon’s announcement to jump on this bandwagon. Of course Microsoft and others have been there. I don’t know to what extend has Amazon been working on this, but given Alexa has been out for a couple of years, I know they have had rich pickings of tuning this further.

I thought Polly (like the parrot?) was quite different from the things I have seen from others. This is a text-to-speech, where it renders the inputted text into various dialects and you can have a few outputs for those too. It supports a few dialects (for the synthesized speech) and one can use it using a simple API (the Android example shows it is not very complex to consume, of course you still need to think about the overall design and elements of Software Engineering, latency, limits, bandwidth, etc.). Should you desire you can customize it using pronunciation  Lexicons  that allow one to tweak this.

Here are a few examples, none of them are me, and hence the “cold”.

Australian (Male):

Indian (Female):

Italian (Male):

US/American (Male):

Of course, if you play with it, it is easy to pick up the patterns and what is being changed, versus not. But kudos to the team on this. I think it will help accelerate the adoption of #AI.