The Ebert test gauges whether a computer-based synthesized voice [1] [2] can tell a joke with sufficient skill to cause people to laugh. [3] It was proposed by film critic Roger Ebert at the 2011 TED conference as a challenge to software developers to have a computerized voice master the inflections, delivery, timing, and intonations of a speaking human. [1] The test is similar to the Turing test proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 as a way to gauge a computer's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior by generating performance indistinguishable from a human being. [4]
If the computer can successfully tell a joke, and do the timing and delivery as well as Henny Youngman, then that's the voice I want.
— Ebert in 2011 [2]
Ebert lost his voice after surgery to treat cancer. He employed a Scottish company called CereProc, which custom-tailors text-to-speech software for voiceless customers who record their voices at length before losing them, and mined tapes and DVD commentaries featuring Ebert to create a voice that sounded more like his own voice. [5] He first publicly used the voice they devised for him in his March 2, 2010, appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show . [2] [6] [7]
In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), tasks that are hypothesized to require artificial general intelligence to solve are informally known as AI-complete or AI-hard. Calling a problem AI-complete reflects the belief that it cannot be solved by a simple specific algorithm.
Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines to applied disciplines.
The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot have a "mind", "understanding", or "consciousness", regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. Philosopher John Searle presented the argument in his paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1980. Gottfried Leibniz (1714), Anatoly Dneprov (1961), Lawrence Davis (1974) and Ned Block (1978) presented similar arguments. Searle's version has been widely discussed in the years since. The centerpiece of Searle's argument is a thought experiment known as the Chinese room.
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech. The reverse process is speech recognition.
Roger Joseph Ebert was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, essayist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. Ebert was known for his intimate, Midwestern writing style and critical views informed by values of populism and humanism. Writing in a prose style intended to be entertaining and direct, he made sophisticated cinematic and analytical ideas more accessible to non-specialist audiences. Ebert frequently endorsed foreign and independent films he believed would be appreciated by mainstream viewers, championing filmmakers like Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, as well as Martin Scorsese, whose first published review he wrote. In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times said Ebert "was without question the nation's most prominent and influential film critic," and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called him "the best-known film critic in America."
Stand-up comedy is a form of comedy performance directed to a live audience, where the performer stands on a stage and delivers humorous and satirical monologues sometimes incorporating physical acts. These performances are typically composed of rehearsed scripts but often include varying degrees of live crowd interaction. Stand-up comedy consists of one-liners, stories, observations, or shticks that can employ props, music, impressions, magic tricks, or ventriloquism.
A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human in order to deter bot attacks and spam.
"Computing Machinery and Intelligence" is a seminal paper written by Alan Turing on the topic of artificial intelligence. The paper, published in 1950 in Mind, was the first to introduce his concept of what is now known as the Turing test to the general public.
Comic timing or comedic timing emerges from a performer's joke delivery: they interact with an audience—intonation, rhythm, cadence, tempo, and pausing—to guide the audience's laughter, which then guides the comedic narrative. The pacing of the delivery of a joke can have a strong impact on its comedic effect, even altering its meaning; the same can also be true of more physical comedy such as slapstick. Comic timing is also crucial for comedic video editing to maximize the impact of a joke, for example, through a smash cut.
Gilbert Jeremy Gottfried was an American stand-up comedian and actor, best known for his exaggerated shrill voice, strong New York accent, and his edgy, often controversial, sense of humor. His numerous roles in film and television included voicing Iago in Disney's Aladdin franchise, Mister Mxyzptlk in Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Action, Digit LeBoid in PBS Kids' Cyberchase, Kraang and Subprime in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the Aflac duck. He also played Mr. Peabody in the Problem Child franchise.
Robby Garner is an American natural language programmer and software developer. He won the 1998 and 1999 Loebner Prize contests with the program called Albert One. He is listed in the 2001 Guinness Book of World Records as having written the "most human" computer program.
Bee Movie is a 2007 American animated comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and Columbus 81 Productions, and distributed by Paramount Pictures. Directed by Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner from a screenplay by the writing team of Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Barry Marder and Andy Robin, it stars the voices of Seinfeld, Renée Zellweger, Matthew Broderick, John Goodman, Patrick Warburton, and Chris Rock. The film centers on Barry B. Benson (Seinfeld), a honey bee who tries to sue the human race for exploiting bees after learning from his new florist friend Vanessa Bloome (Zellweger) that humans sell and consume honey.
The philosophy of artificial intelligence is a branch of the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of computer science that explores artificial intelligence and its implications for knowledge and understanding of intelligence, ethics, consciousness, epistemology, and free will. Furthermore, the technology is concerned with the creation of artificial animals or artificial people so the discipline is of considerable interest to philosophers. These factors contributed to the emergence of the philosophy of artificial intelligence.
The Conference on World Affairs (CWA) is an annual conference, featuring panel discussions among experts in international affairs and other areas, founded by sociologist Howard Higman and hosted by the University of Colorado Boulder since 1948. Long-running events include Cinema Interruptus, an analysis of a movie with audience, founded and hosted for many years by Roger Ebert, and a jazz concert hosted by Dave and Don Grusin. All events free and open to the public.
A voice font is a computer-generated voice that can be controlled by specifying parameters such as speed and pitch and made to pronounce text input. The concept is akin to that of a text font or a MIDI instrument in the sense that the same input may easily be represented in several different ways based on the design of each font. In spite of current shortcomings in the underlying technology for voice fonts, screen readers and other devices used to enhance accessibility of text to persons with disabilities, can benefit from having more than one default voice font. This happens in the same way that users of a traditional computer word processor benefit from having more than one text font.
Computational humor is a branch of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence which uses computers in humor research. It is a relatively new area, with the first dedicated conference organized in 1996.
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation was a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel, such as a computer keyboard and screen, so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator could not reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine would be said to have passed the test. The test results would not depend on the machine's ability to give correct answers to questions, only on how closely its answers resembled those a human would give. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the verbal version generalizes naturally to all of human performance capacity, verbal as well as nonverbal (robotic).
Richard Davies deBronkart Jr, widely known as e-Patient Dave, is a cancer patient and blogger who, in 2009, became a noted activist for healthcare transformation through participatory medicine and personal health data rights.
CereProc is a speech synthesis company based in Edinburgh, Scotland, founded in 2005. The company specialises in creating natural and expressive-sounding text to speech voices, synthesis voices with regional accents, and in voice cloning.
This glossary of artificial intelligence is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to the study of artificial intelligence, its sub-disciplines, and related fields. Related glossaries include Glossary of computer science, Glossary of robotics, and Glossary of machine vision.
With the help of his wife, two colleagues and the Alex-equipped MacBook that he uses to generate his computerized voice, famed film critic Roger Ebert delivered the final talk at the TED conference on Friday in Long Beach, California....
Now perhaps, there is the Ebert Test, a way to see if a synthesized voice can deliver humor with the timing to make an audience laugh.... He proposed the Ebert Test as a way to gauge the humanness of a synthesized voice.
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: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)Meanwhile, the technology that enables Ebert to "speak" continues to see improvements – for example, adding more realistic inflection for question marks and exclamation points. In a test of that, which Ebert called the "Ebert test" for computerized voices,
He calls it the "Ebert Test," after Turing's AI standard...