[michael_h]

Yeah, it's a bit more difficult of a task than you've assumed.

Speech synthesis receives a lot of attention, but it's hard, so you rarely hear any news about it. People are throwing DNNs at it at the moment, but nothing earth shattering has come of it (yet). I have a couple of 'naturalness' filters that use DNNs and about 30% of the time, they drop all of their tones and I end up with an angry whisper as output. I don't work late too often.

[TuringTest]

For people interested in how hard it is, I recently read this [1] NYT article providing a comparison of synthetic speech that IBM experts tested for Watson in the Jeopardy competition.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/15/technology/creating-a-comp...