Maybe you watched the unveiling of IBM’s Watson live on Jeopardy! in 2009. Or perhaps you caught the tech firm’s latest ad campaign on TV, which features goofy dialogues between Watson and Serena Williams, Richard Thaler, or Bob Dylan.
Even if not, chances are you’ve interacted with a talking computer at some point. But creating a convincing talking computer is actually really hard. In an interesting story in the New York Times on Monday, tech writer John Markoff discussed the effort that went into creating the voice for IBM’s Watson and used that as a way into a discussion of the efforts under way to create more natural and acceptable computer voices.
Image: Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a computer in the movie "Her.” - https://www.technologyreview.com
