newscaster it is because i can, and it seemed like an interesting idea to try. and it is still very me. 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 goingj to be 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 weighed. not least because i am planning
they have taken things even further by combining his synthetic voice with a virtual avatar, which is a work in progress. it is amazing what technology can do these days. so, where does the ai start, and peter stop? there is a path of least resistance. if the ai says stop 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 for peter, rather thanjust being a default system. you are watching peter at hay festival. that was nick, so what can peter 2.0 de? that is what stephen fry asked at this year s hay festival, and this was the answer. and if one day i not sounding like a classic american
up before they become our robotic overlords! the hay festival is steeped in tradition. it is a place where people come to exchange their screens for good old fashioned books. but, the pandemic has forced even the most kin conventional to adapt, and this appearance has proved no gimmick. i am the transitioning cyborg. this is peter scott morgan who has motor neurone disease, but he s also a doctor of robotics and he calls himself the world s first human cyborg. peter, who was diagnosed with als in 2015 decided to use technology to overcome the extreme difficulty is that he knew that he would face. he said that he chose to thrive rather than die or stop there have been two sides to his transformation, the physical and the virtual and in a minute, stephen fry will talk to one side
exactly the way that he spoke. text to speech technology has been around for a while. all remember microsoft sam, right? peter provided far more than the average voice sample recording. 15 hours worth of material. in order to make a voice you take the audio and you use a system to learn how the sounds and 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 convey sentiment for specific scenarios, peter captured himself speaking in four different styles. the tone of voice is very important. is very important! tone of voice is very. important. he also tirelessly recorded
3000 stock phrases, which he can quickly drop into conversation. a little knowledge may be a dangerous thing but it is not half as bad as a lot of ignorance. write 0k. doesn t want an automatic voice that talks were him, he wants an automatic voice that he can control. the whole idea of human sensitive ai is work as a partnership and peter has got a great phrase. he describes it as a jazz combo. it is 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. # and you will be in a world of your imagination! - this is brilliant. how did you manage that, then? again, it is about communication, notjust about the words you say.