Aflorithmic, an audio content production company and digital human creators UneeQ have come together to synthesize the voice of legendary scientist Albert Einstein.
The organizations wish to allow the users to ask AI questions to a more realistic Einstein similar to how they would be engaging with the real-life physicist himself. The companies have chosen Einstein due to his famous reputation as an actual genius, historical icon, technology enthusiast, and someone they felt many people would want to ask many questions.
UneeQ has combined visual character rendering techniques with an advanced computational knowledge engine to make this prototype as realistic as possible. However, in terms of resurrecting an authentic voice based on the real Albert Einstein, researchers had to face a few setbacks. The primary reason being that the only accounts they managed to uncover from historical records reported Einstein to have a heavy German accent and that he spoke, slowly, wisely, and kindly in a high-pitched tone.
Due to Einstein’s thick accent and the poor quality of the old recordings of his voice, development teams struggled to capture a solid frame of reference for how he may have sounded. The organizations, however, do not expect that too many users will worry that much about the accuracy of Einstein’s voice when it comes to this new bot. Thus, researchers plan to create a unique voice for Einstein that might not be identical to the physicist’s voice but will become one that users of this bot will recognize.
This new version of Einstein’s voice has the physicist still speaking with a German accent with an added sense of dry humor and friendliness to reflect that of his real-life personality. Researchers have also given this AI the ability to speak as if reflecting upon his knowledge when interacting with users.
Along with the voice cloning aspect, researchers also developed Digital Einstein to respond quickly to user questions, similar to a customer service chatbot or personal assistant. They created a real-time turnaround for input text received by the computational knowledge engine to Aflorithmic’s API to achieve this. Since then, in merely two weeks, the research teams managed to decrease the Einstein bot’s response time from 12 seconds to less than three seconds. The companies predict that the Digital Einstein project is just the beginning of the interactive potential of conversational AI with humans.
Source:
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-04-digital-human-platform-life-einstein.html
Live Project: https://einstein.digitalhumans.com/
Consultant Intern: Kriti Maloo is currently pursuing her B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bhubaneswar. She is interested in Data Analytics and its applications in various domains. She is a Bibliophile and loves to explore new advancements in the field of technology.
