“In the battle to apply deep-learning techniques to the real world, one company stands head and shoulders above the competition. Google’s DeepMind subsidiary has used the technique to create machines that can beat humans at video games and the ancient game of Go. And last year, Google Translate services significantly improved thanks to the behind-the-scenes introduction of deep-learning techniques. So it’s interesting to see how other companies are racing to catch up. Today, it is the turn of Baidu, an Internet search company that is sometimes described as the Chinese equivalent of Google. In 2013, Baidu opened an artificial intelligence research lab in Silicon Valley, raising an interesting question: what has it been up to? Now Baidu’s artificial intelligence lab has revealed its work on speech synthesis. One of the challenges in speech synthesis is to reduce the amount of fine-tuning that goes on behind the scenes. Baidu’s big breakthrough is to create a deep-learning machine that largely does away with this kind of meddling. The result is a text-to-speech system called Deep Voice that can learn to talk in just a few hours with little or no human interference.”