[novalis78]

What's really intriguing is the part in their article where they explain the "babbling" of wavenet, when they train the network without the text input.

That sounds just like a small kid imitating a foreign (or their own) language. My kids grow up bilingual and I hear them attempt something similar when they are really small. I guess it's like listening in to their neural network modelling the sound of the new language.

[sjwright]

To my Australian English ears, the babbling sounded vaguely Scandinavian.

[novalis78]

Indeed. I was surprised by that as well. Sounded like a Dutch speaker with a muffled voice behind a screen.

[space_fountain]

Might just be that English is fairly close to German and the like but as English speakers it doesn't sound like English to us because we know English so it gets mapped as a similar but different language.

[dharma1]

Confirms my thought that Dutch sounds like unintelligible babbling :)

[vintermann]

Especially funny as the main authors are Dutch.

[rattray]

Ah. Perhaps it was trained on Dutch speakers, not English.

[sjwright]

That would explain it. Would be interesting to hear babbling trained with other languages and accents.

[ralfd]

To my German ears it sounded definitely English, not Dutch, like a very hard to understand dialect.