Xiaomi will be famous for smartphones and a myriad of IoT products, but there’s more to this brand than its more popular devices. The brand has now revealed a technology text to speech It was developed by Xiaomi AI Lab which allows you to create a unique and personalized voice for users with speech disorders.
This unique voice replaces more common electronic sounds, allowing a person with a speech disorder to communicate with others in a natural tone. The initiative grew out of the “Own My Voice” project led by Xiaomi’s “Technology for Good” committee.
Why did Xiaomi launch this project?
Xiaomi cares about people and strives to meet their needs through technological innovation. He discovered the desire of many users with speech disorders to have their unique voices for everyday communication and created a project team “I have my voice” To invite a speechless user to act as an audio receiver. Zhou Shi, Chairman of the Technology Committee of Technology for Good From Xiaomi said: “We are excited to explore the multiple values that technological innovation brings us, such as responding to users’ requests for their identity and building their identity”.
How did Xiaomi implement the project?
In order to generate the most appropriate and personalized voice for the recipient, the team has recruited more than 200 volunteers within Xiaomi to donate their voices. They used a voice matching algorithm to match the characteristics of the voices donated by the volunteers with the voices of the recipient. Through this approach, they find the most suitable sound as the primary reference sound for the receiver. With personalization and privacy protection in mind, the selected real sound has been manipulated through intricate acoustic modifications to create a new and original acoustic sound.
Then they used the automatically designed text-to-speech technology to train the AI model, making this new voice gradually acquire a natural rhythm and tone capable of truly expressing human emotion and tone.
The project “I have my voice” It combines a variety of the most advanced algorithms with Xiaomi’s self-developed speech technology to ensure the privacy, security and high fidelity of the synthesized voice, creating a new idea of personalized speech synthesis for users with speech disorders.
What is the meaning of the project?
The backbone of this project is a group of speech technology experts from Xiaomi AI Lab. Since 2017, they have published 37 theses on speech in the proceedings of major international conferences such as the International Conference on Voice, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). success “I have my voice” It is mainly based on the automatically designed and developed text-to-speech technology.
Spontaneous style text-to-speech technology makes the voice synthesized like a real human in tone, pause, speed and other characteristics. This replaces the monotonous and unnatural sensation of electronic sound with a more natural sound. This technology is currently applicable to many smart devices equipped with Xiaoai, Xiaomi’s AI voice assistant. The project “I have my voice” It shows that automated text-to-speech technology can also be widely adopted in the areas of accessibility and user experience improvement.
Zhou Shi added: “If we notice and address the needs of minorities at an early stage, the process of technology deployment can be significantly shortened. This allows the benefits of new technologies to be accessible to users with disabilities without delay.”.
From now on, Xiaomi will continue to receive feedback from audio receivers and will continue to study the feasibility of this project in a larger scale. Xiaomi will continue to enable accessibility with the latest technologies, and strive to meet people’s diverse needs through technological innovation.
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