The American presidential campaign is set to make waves this side of the pond at Edinburgh’s Turing Festival after text-to-speech firm CereProc announced they would be bringing its chief protagonists to the historic city – as disembodied voices.
Dubbed Presidential Nutbots, the scheme will entail bringing the politicians to life via advanced speech synthesis to create an experience which its creators claim will simulate chatting with the pair.
The resulting ‘semi-intelligent’ conversations are constructed from audio recordings to convey a synthetic voice that contains all the nuances of expression and delivery which make each individual unique.
There is a point to all this technical tomfoolery, the demonstration is intended to explore the Turing Test – a hypothesis for judging when machine intelligence matches our own.
Dr. Matthew Aylett, CTO at CereProc commented: “We’ve enjoyed creating the voices for Presidential Nutbots, and are pleased with the results. It will be fantastic to see the demonstration in action, and I’m sure everyone will have a lot of fun chatting with Obama and Romney.
“As a limited Turing test, it’ll be interesting to look at how well the chatbots simulate actual conversations with the politicians, who are typically a different breed of human!”
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