Machines That Talk (Chapter 7, part 2)
from Between the Signs: The Speech Communication Podcast
Teaching a machine to speak means inventing everything the text leaves out — and getting it right, because listeners use melody and rhythm to repair what they did not quite catch. This episode traces four generations of talking machines, from modelling the human speech apparatus to gluing together recorded fragments to learning the whole mapping statistically. Then the harder problem: a conversation is not a sequence of sentences. What a dialog system has to keep track of, why its most important skill is talking about the conversation itself, and why confirming what it understood is a choice between being safe and being bearable. This episode was generated with artificial intelligence (NotebookLM) on the basis of the lecture script, and the voices are synthetic. In case of doubt, the lecture and the script are authoritative.
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