"Hai Xiaotang" at the World Intelligence Congress [Photo provided to exploringtianjin.com]

"Welcome to Tianjin for the World Intelligence Congress." The voice came from "Hai Xiaotang" (Little Crabapple Flower), the first Artificial Intelligence (AI) Newscaster at Tianjin university. After Wang Longbiao, a professor from the College of Intelligence and Computing at Tianjin University, typed a few words into the computer and pressed Enter, this message was immediately read out in a sweet and sunny voice.

In order to welcome the 3rd World Intelligence Congress, Tianjin University, together with Huiyan Tech, unveiled an AI newscaster, that can greet the person and provide information and news on the Congress, Tianjin and Tianjin University to the visitors around the clock. 

According to Professor Wang, Hai Xiaotang was created based on end-to-end deep learning speech synthesis technology. 

"We developed a set of sound teaching materials and asked Wang Herong, a female news reader from the Voice of Peiyang at Tianjin university, to teach the robot how to speak. Her words became the effective material for it to learn. Now it has already surpassed its teacher and is proficient enough to sound like its source voice. " Wang said.

Hai Xiaotang can broadcast as well as a human news reporter. As long as text is typed in, it can accurately broadcast news without any noticeable difference from a real person and tirelessly report the news at all hours.

 To illustrate the competence quality of the voice Professor Wang found a 2000-word review of the World Intelligence Congress and let the machine compete with a person. The speaking speed, the voice, and the intonation of the two resembled each other, but the robot did not make mistakes, while the human did twice. Compared with the existing artificial intelligence news reporters, the voice of the robot is no longer stiff and artificial sounding, and its tone is exactly the same as that of a human.

"Tianjin University has a good foundation and strengths in cognitive computing, speech signal processing, machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition, computer vision and natural language processing which are related to artificial intelligence. The intelligent speech team at Tianjin University has presided over a 973 Project in the field of speech sound, making itself a national leader in the algorithms of speech generation, speech interaction and speech synthesis," Wang said.

During the World Intelligence Congress, Tianjin University will not only invite Turing Award winners to interact with college students and middle school students, but also create a special online zone where the intelligent newscaster Hai Xiaotang can introduce the World Intelligence Congress and report its latest news to the audience.