Google – Deep speech.

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DeepMind shows signs of paying its way.

• Google’s first use of DeepMind technology in one of its commercial products is likely to be the first of many that could allow it to extend its leading position when it comes to intelligent Digital Life services.
• DeepMind is the UK based AI company that Google bought at vast expense in 2014 which has gone on to be one of the leaders in its field.
• Most of DeepMind’s research is in games but it has already been able to make a substantial saving in electricity costs in Google’s data centres.
• The new service being launched is called Cloud Text-to-Speech and it makes a good improvement in the quality with which machines cam mimic human style and tone of speech.
• Most text-to-speech systems use concatenative synthesis where the algorithm stores the syllables and then puts them together in real time.
• This is why most machine speech sounds exactly like what it is: machines trying to talk.
• WaveNet from DeepMind uses AI to generate audio from scratch based on a huge data base of human speech in waveform.
• The result is still machine speech, but it is much more realistic and is capable of adding accents and noises that humans make during speech that are not words but still convey meaning.
• This has been around since 2016 but when it was first demonstrated it was too computationally intensive to be usable at scale.
• Since then, the computational requirement has been substantially reduced so that it could be commercially deployed in Google Assistant in October 2017 (English and Japanese only).
• This draws an important parallel with RFM research which found that by far the biggest advance in AI made in 2017 was DeepMind’s ability to create Chess, Shogi and Go algorithms that could beat the best of the rest but use less than 0.5% of the resources (see here).
• It is this ability that could allow Google to push deep, rich and intuitive services more effectively into cheap devices, making life very difficult for the competition.
• This is an initial sign of this strategy which, if effective, would make DeepMind one of the best acquisitions Google has made in its history.
• There is still a very long go until DeepMind may make a tangible financial contribution to Google’s bottom line and I think that the best of the short to medium growth has now been experienced.
• This is why I remain pretty ambivalent to Alphabet’s shares.