steeped in tradition a place where people come to exchange their screens for a good old fashioned book. but the pandemic has forced even the most conventional to adapt, and this appearance has gone beyond digital and has proved no gimmick. i am a transitioning cyborg. this is peter scott morgan, and he has motor neurone disease, also known as als. but he s also a doctor of robotics and he calls himself the world s first human cyborg. peter was diagnosed with als in 2015 and that was when he decided to use technology to overcome the extreme difficultits that he knew that he would face. he said that he chose to thrive rather than die. there have been two sides to peter s transformation the physical and the virtual. and in a minute, stephen fry
and it seemed like an interesting idea to try. and it is still the real me. ok, here are some highlights from peter s session at the festival. stephen, it is absolutely wonderful to be talking with you. thanks so much for inviting me. it is going to be fun. i think it is, it s going to be fun and fascinating. - first things first, you have described yourself as a transitioning cyborg. how do you define a cyborg? cyborg is a fancy word for part human, part machine. in my case, what has never been done before is that the most important machine parts of me will be ai, not mechanics, and that all potentially gets a bit weird. not least because i am planning to use more and more ai, to look at everything from speaking to controlling
be a dangerous thing, but is not half as bad as a lot of ignorance! right, 0k. he doesn t want an automatic voice which talks for him, he wants an automatic voice which he can control. the whole idea of human centred ai is to work as a partnership and peter has got a great phrase he sort of describes it as a jazz combo . it s like the idea of two systems working together to produce something which is greater than the sum of their parts. and create, they have they have taught peter 2.0 how to sing. # come with me. # and you ll be. # ..in a world of pure imagination! this is brilliant! # take a look. how did you manage that, then? well, again. are you willy wonka? no! it is about communication, not just about the words you say. they ve taken things even further by combining his
and it is still the real me. ok, here are some highlights from peter s session at the festival. stephen, it is absolutely wonderful to be talking with you. thanks so much for inviting me. it is going to be fun. i think it is, it s going to be fun and fascinating. - first things first, you have described yourself as a transitioning cyborg. how do you define a cyborg? cyborg is a fancy word for part human, part machine. in my case, what has never been done before is that the most important machine parts of me will be ai, not mechanics, and that all potentially gets a bit weird. not least because i am planning to use more and more ai, to look at everything from speaking to controlling things to moving about. i think that it is fair to say.
we all remember microsoft sam, right? sam speaks monotonously: h 3 voice sounded a tad monotonous. peter provided far more than the average voice sample recording amount 15 hours worth of material. in order to make a voice, you take that audio and you use neural net system to learn how the sounds in the voice relate to the words that are being spoken. once you have that model built, you can put a new set of words in and it will produce a new output with that voice. to better convey sentiment for specific scenarios, peter captured himself speaking in four different styles. tone of voice is very important. tone of voice is very important! tone of voice is very important. he also tirelessly recorded 3,000 stock phrases, which he can quickly drop into conversation. a little knowledge may