Artificial intelligence startup Sonantic has created a program to simulate flirtatious speech patterns, as well as breaths and perky laughter. The guys did this for a reason, but on Valentine's Day, in order to demonstrate a new engineering solution in particular and the progress of their development in general - the ability of AI to flirt, and, as stated, very realistically.

A real actress starred in the published video, but her monologue was completely generated by algorithms. In the video, the girl flirts with the viewer and confesses her love to him, but at the end she admits that in fact "she does not exist." To achieve these results, the Sonantic engineering team studied the nature of live speech during flirting — how people change their voice and intonation to sound romantic and flirtatious.

The startup announced the creation of a neural network to generate speech with imitation of human emotions in 2020. For two years, the developers have made great progress. In the first videos, the voice of the AI ​​did not sound very natural, and the speech was accompanied by distortion.

The company already-made voice models that express happiness or sadness, but flirting is much more difficult. To do this, AI developers had to create a new shy or even teasing style of speech that uses slowing down, pauses and fake a soft smile. This new program will be used in movie or game dubbing to make NPCs or secondary characters sound more realistic.

Previously, this program, for example, was used by Obsidian Entertainment to generate the voices of some minor characters in The Outer Worlds.

In August 2021, the startup Sonantic applied its developments to recreate the voice of actor Val Kilmer, who lost the ability to speak as a result of treatment for laryngeal cancer.

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