Across the websites of local newspapers such as the Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee and The Kansas City Star, a new embedded narration option now offers to read each article aloud with a cadence, inflection and sometimes even an emotional tone that one would expect from a real human speaker.
But the voice reading the articles on these McClatchy media properties is no human—though sometimes it imitates one convincingly enough to fool focus group participants. Rather, it is a neural network trained on thousands of hours of human speech patterns to yield a text-to-speech tool that represents a turning point for a technology long known for its stilted monotone and awkward pacing and pronunciation.
McClatchy,
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