but first, nick kwek has been looking at how peter 2.0 has been realised. today, i m in the scottish capital of edinburgh, a city with a rich history of storytelling, where novel ideas come to life and the art of discourse has been mastered. i m here to meet the engineers putting personality into synthetic voice. voice is part of what we are, it s part of our souls, it s the way we communicate, it betrays where we are from, our emotions, our motives, everything. dr matthew aylett and his team have been banking peter s voice so that peter can continue to talk now it is gone. he had to have his vocal track removed, so before that happened, we recorded him extensively and then we were able to recreate his voice in a speech synthesis system so he can now type in text and it will speak exactly the way that he used to speak. text to speech technology has been around for a while.
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, who 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 difficulty that he knew that he would face. he said that he chose to thrive rather than die. there have been two sides to his transformation the physical and the virtual and in a minute, stephen fry will talk to one side about the other.
synthetic voice with a virtual avatar, which is a work in progress. it s pretty amazing what technology can do these days. so, where does the ai start, and peter stop? lumbar phobia there is a path of least resistance. if the ai says stuff in a certain way it is easy to say let s just do that, then, but then how do you get the balance right? the real key is for the al to be personalised to peter, rather thanjust being a default system. you are watching click at hay festival. that was nick, so what can peter 2.0 do? that is what stephen fry asked at this year s hay festival, and this was the answer. speaks french. translation: and if one day i start sounding like a classicl american newscaster it is because i can, and it seemed like an interesting idea to try.
to exchange their screens for good old fashioned books. but the pandemic has forced even the most conventional to adapt, and this appearance has proved no gimmick. it has gone beyond digital. i am a transitioning cyborg. this is peter scott morgan, who 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 decided to use technology to overcome the extreme difficulty that he knew that he would face. he said that he chose to thrive rather than die. there have been two sides to his transformation the physical and the virtual and in a minute, stephen fry will talk to one side about the other.
we all remember microsoft sam, right? his 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. 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