Spotify is using AI to drive podcast language translation in what sounds like the podcaster’s own voice, which has obvious implications for film and television dubbing. Working with podcast notables including Dax Shepard, Monica Padman and Bill Simmons, Spotify used AI to mimic their voices in Spanish, French and German for several episodes. The proprietary Spotify technology uses OpenAI’s new text-to-speech voice-generation technology as well as its open-source Whisper speech recognition system, which transcribes spoken words into text. The result, Spotify says, is “more authentic” and “more personal and natural” than traditional dubbing. Continue reading Spotify Uses AI to Copy Host Voices for Podcast Translations

MLPerf, a consortium of 40 technology companies including Google and Facebook, just released benchmarks for evaluating artificial intelligence-enabled tools, including image recognition, object detection and voice translation. MLPerf general chair Peter Mattson, a Google engineer, reported, “for CIOs, metrics make for better products and services they can then incorporate into their organization.” Thus far, organizations have been slow to adopt AI technologies, in part due to the plethora of tools and services available. Continue reading Consortium Releases New Measurement Benchmarks for AI