Yandex taught its voice assistant Alice to whisper – now if you turn to her in a whisper, she will also lower her voice in response. This function will allow you to communicate with your assistant even while loved ones are sleeping.
Alice’s training to speak in a whisper took place in several stages. On the first, she was taught to understand when a person whispers. This turned out to be a very difficult task, since whispering is not just a soft sound (people whisper with little or no use of their vocal chords). Therefore, the voice assistant’s neural network was taught to recognize whispers by the sound spectrum. In parallel with this, Alice learned to distinguish between a whisper and a deaf voice (as with a cold) – this also turned out to be a difficult test, since a whisper and a deaf voice are very similar to the spectrum.
At other stages, Alice had to learn to whisper herself. To begin with, it was loaded with several hours of whispering by Tatyana Shitova (the actress who voiced the voice assistant), but this was not enough to train the voice synthesis model.
“Alice is loved in many ways because she looks like a person. You can joke and chat with her, she has her own character and sense of humor. Whispering is another human manifestation that is now characteristic of Alice. I must say that she has already mastered several voice options. For example, Alisa conducts the morning show cheerfully and cheerfully, and translates the video in a more phlegmatic manner so as not to distract from watching, ”said Sergey Melnik, head of Yandex smart devices.
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