the times | Monday July 27 2020 1GM 19
News
They may have become a familiar voice
in many homes but the last word one
might use to describe Amazon’s Alexa
or Apple’s Siri is emotional.
Most digital voice assistants have a
computer-generated, flat voice devoid
of emotion, which is frustrating for
companies trying to use such voices in
games or films.
A small British company called Son-
antic has now created an artificial voice
that can cry and speak with “deep
human emotion”.
The company, which has only ten
staff, is working with some of the big-
gest video game studios to record dia-
logue for their characters with comput-
er-generated voices. The technology
enables a program to read the words
and simulate the emotion of an actor.
Zeena Qureshi, chief executive of
Sonantic, said: “We create hyper-realis-
tic artificial voices. Unlike other text-
to-speech companies, we specialise in
subtleties and nuance, giving voice act-
ing on demand, essentially.”
Normally games studios will use
actors to provide the voices for their
characters but this means that last-
minute changes to the plot can lead to
delay in getting an actor back in to do
extra lines of dialogue. Sonantic’s soft-
ware cuts this process down to minutes.
The user can select different voices
for different circumstances, such as a
Emotional AI voice is
a far cry from Alexa
character running who needs to sound
out of breath, or one being kidnapped
who should sound panicked.
“Voice pipelines and entertainment
work are quite heavy on logistics, such
as casting, editing, directing, booking
studios and doing several iterations and
there is quite a lot of cost going into
that,” Ms Qureshi, 29, said. “We can
take the process from months down to
minutes and spare the hassle of all the
logistics involved, and it’s cheaper.”
The company works with actors to
develop the software by getting them to
record various words and lines with
different emotions, which the AI tool
then learns to deploy itself. The actors
get royalties for the synthetic voice that
has been created through their work.
John Flynn, chief technology officer,
said: “We are using deep learning to
really focus on those micro elements of,
say, what constitutes sadness. So we
have the algorithms focus on the in-
takes of breath and different sort of
noises that would happen when some-
one is crying and the pitches of tone.”
Mr Flynn, 37, used to work in the
audio editing of raw footage from films
such as Bohemian Rhapsody and the
Harry Potter series, and wanted to cap-
ture the subtleties in performance that
actors can give with each line.
The company said they have also
been approached by television and film
studios since the coronavirus lockdown
began as most recording studios for
traditional voiceover work are closed.Tom Knowles
Technology Correspondent
GERRY WYATT/PICTUREEXCLUSIVE.COMTornado’s trail
of destruction
shocks village
John SimpsonA tornado uprooted sheds, damaged
power lines and ripped off roof tiles as it
tore through an East Midlands village.
Images showed fences destroyed and
sheds left in disarray after the tornado
hit allotments in Moulton, near North-
ampton, at about 8pm on Saturday dur-
ing high winds and storms.
There are between 30 and 50 low-
intensity tornados in Britain each year,
reaching speeds of about 112mph and in
some cases causing more serious
damage and injury.
Researchers at the University of
Manchester found that Britain’s torna-
do season was between May and Octo-
ber, and the most prone regions were
the south, southeast and west.
The Northamptonshire tornado is
thought to have started in the Duston
area and ended in Kingsthorpe. Foot-
age showed debris being thrown into
the air. Joe Minney, from Moulton, said
that his bathroom blind was ripped
from its fixings when the window blew
open. He added: “I couldn’t physically
shut the back door. It was all over so
quickly, maybe 30 seconds or so.”
A funnel cloud needs to touch the
ground to be classed as a tornado. The
Met Office said: “If a funnel cloud does
make contact with the ground and
produce a tornado, very strong winds
can be expected in the immediate vicin-
ity of the vortex potentially causing
severe damage.”Dancing duo A pair of dolphins are perfectly in sync as they jump out of the
water off Cheswick Sands near Berwick-upon-Tweed in Northumberland