Mitchell Philipp

Mr. Greenlee

AP Computer Science A, Period 6

7 December 2018

Summary: Amazon has begun using AI and machine learning to teach Alexa to mimic different speaking styles. Namely, she has learned to read the news like a TV newscaster. Amazon believes this project shows the potential of Alexa to learn many more speaking styles for different purposes.

Opinion: Finally! I am sick and tired of the day's events being droned to me by some mindless, biased human newscaster. I'm ready for the news to be droned to me by a mindless and biased robot instead! Honestly, why do we even have newscasters anymore?? When is Google gonna just start piping information into the neural chips that we all know they've installed in our brains? I mean, everyone already knows about them, people just don't talk about them. It's kinda like the tooth fairy. Everyone knows the tooth fairy is just an archdemon, set loose by the government to gather dental data from all the children to make sure that Compound 11 is being effective in their develomental alteration, but we all pretend it's a sweet, gift-giving pixie, for the childrens' sakes. This is the same principle, where we all just pretend there aren't neural chips in our brains, so that the sheeple can keep sleeping at night. All in all, I think this is a major improvement to the current technology, but it could be easily overshadowed if the government would just take action for once.

Citation: James Vincent, "Alexa will soon be able to read the news just like a professional", The Verge, 11/20/2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/20/18104413/amazon-alexa-speaking-style-machine-learning-neural-ntts-newscaster