Teaching AI to communicate sounds like humans do
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Whether you’re describing the sound of your faulty car engine or meowing like your neighbor’s cat, imitating sounds with your voice can be a helpful way to relay a concept when words don’t do the trick.
Vocal imitation is the sonic equivalent of doodling a quick picture to communicate something you saw — except that instead of using a pencil to illustrate an image, you use your vocal tract to express a sound. This might seem difficult, but it’s something we all do intuitively: To experience it for yourself, try using your voice to mirror the sound of an ambulance siren, a crow, or a bell being struck.
Inspired by the cognitive science of how we communicate, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have developed an AI system that can produce human-like vocal imitations with no training, and without ever having "heard" a human vocal impression before.
