Teaching AI to learn speech the way children do

This post details the ZeroSpeech 2019 challenge, a research initiative focused on teaching AI systems to learn speech using only audio input, without text or phonetic labels. The challenge aims to develop AI that can discover its own discrete 'orthographic' notation for unknown languages and re-synthesize speech. This contributes to research in unsupervised learning for speech synthesis, particularly for low-resource languages, and advances natural language understanding beyond English-centric work.