People are remarkably good at focusing their attention on a particular person in a noisy environment, mentally “muting” all other voices and sounds. Known as the cocktail party effect, this capability comes natural to us humans. However, automatic speech separation — separating an audio signal into its individual speech sources — while a well-studied problem, remains a significant challenge for computers.
Source: googleblog.com
There are a lot of neat things going on in deep reinforcement learning. One of the coolest things from last year was OpenAI and DeepMind’s work on training an agent using feedback from a human rather than a classical reward signal. There’s a great blog post about it at Learning from Human Preferences, and the original paper is at Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences.
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AlterEgo is a closed-loop, non-invasive, wearable system that allows humans to converse in high-bandwidth natural language with machines, artificial intelligence assistants, services, and other people without any voice—without opening their mouth, and without any discernible movements—simply by vocalizing internally.
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