Computer speech technology, often referred to as speech recognition or speech synthesis, encompasses a range of techniques and applications that enable computers to process and generate human speech. This technology has evolved significantly over the past few decades, driven by advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP). As a result, speech technology is now embedded in many everyday applications, from virtual assistants to automated...

Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest text-to-speech model in history, which they say demonstrates "an incipient ability to pronounce even complex sentences in a way that sounds quite natural." The technology is constantly improving, but the researchers hope that the level of development of language models will increase as they reach a certain size, and over time they will become much more reliable and versatile, capable of performing tasks that they have not been trained to...