Artificial intelligence is the latest technology and VALL-E is the latest (so far, of course) example. And also how seriously Microsoft has taken the importance of moving forward and taking positions in this market, which is in the stage of absolute hatching. Is it a safe bet or are we facing a new bubble? It is still early days, but the outlook is more in the sense that we are facing something truly devastating.

Like I said, Microsoft took this pretty seriously. We have already talked about their plans to integrate ChatGPT recently, first in Bing and yesterday we learned that also in some Microsoft 365 applications. Today it is also known that those from Redmond are considering increasing their economic participation in OpenAI, the company responsible behind ChatGPT, something that fits perfectly with its plans to make the most of its technology in its products and services.

However, the fact that Microsoft is very interested in OpenAI solutions does not mean that it trusts the said company in everything related to artificial intelligence. As well as keeping a close eye on what many other companies are doing, it is also working with its engineering and R&D teams in this area, either with solutions aimed specifically at one of its products or as an experiment with what AI can do? And it is from this type of research that VALL-E comes.

Although its name reminds you of DALL-E, OpenAI’s image generation AI, in this case we are faced with a slightly different proposal, namely Born from Microsoft labs, VALL-E just listens to three seconds of a voice to imitate it. And while it’s not perfect, the company has released an extensive list of examples of this AI, and the result is, I don’t know whether to say, surprising, fascinating, or chilling.

On the technical side, the results obtained by VALL-E are of course amazing and there are many practical uses that can be given to this solution, which also reminds us a bit of what Apple has developed for storytelling. audiobooks. Voice synthesis software is nothing new and for many years those responsible have been trying to make it sound more and more natural, so VALL-E brings us closer to the top of that mountain with its design.

However, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen AI capable of generating a sound that looks like a person’s voice. Adobe left us speechless in 2016 with Adobe VoCo, a prototype app that was able to “learn” voice and from then on offer text-to-speech translation of any text message.

This artificial intelligence has opened up an important debate about the risks of such a thing in a world where fake news spreads at the speed of light. The possible malicious use of a solution like VALL-E obliges those responsible to act very carefully, otherwise they could see their well-intentioned creations become a tool used for the most nefarious purposes.