In an early demonstration of the power of backprop, Terry Sejnowski and Charles Rosenberg trained a multilayer perceptron to read aloud. Their NETtalk system scanned the text, selected the correct phonemes according to context, and fed them to a speech synthesizer. NETtalk not only generalized accurately to new words, which knowledge-based systems could not, but it learned to speak in a remarkably human-like way. Sejnowski used to mesmerize audiences at research meetings by playing a tape of NETtalk’s progress: babbling at first, then starting to make sense, then speaking smoothly with only
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