What is RIVA Speech clients container in NVIDIA GPU Cloud?

March 24, 2022

Introduction:

The corporate world has struggled with custom voices that resonate with their brand voice. While the technology has made waves in various areas, speech technology was still under experimentation.

The Challenge

Organisations wanting to create 'human-like' voices for their brand.

The brand voice forms a major part of an organization's branding strategy, and it is crucial to get it right, especially for the industries like call centers, where human-like voices are important.

In industries where voice-over is a crucial part of the businesses, AI-powered speech solutions are appreciated for various reasons.

Nvidia GPU Uses Riva Speech AI

When Nvidia unveiled Riva Custom Voice – the idea was to give the organizations to build their own 'human-like' voices. The input required was a mere 30 minutes of speech recording data.

Uses

Development of Virtual Assistant with a Unique Voice: With the feature of 'human-like' voices, Riva Custom Voice helps build virtual assistants with a unique voice.

Support People with Language and Speech Disabilities: With the Riva Custom Voice toolkit, organizations can launch brand voices along with apps that will support people with learning disabilities like speech and language disabilities.

One of the major benefits 

For instance, In the video series of corporate training, brand voices are required to do the recording of phone trees as well as e-learning scripts. For organizations, this cost adds up, and this is where Riva Custom Voice helps reduce the cost.

Various organizations use AI-powered speech to create a brand voice that is unique to their organizations and yet has the elements of human voice modulation.

Riva Speech – AI-Powered Voices – The Challenges

The Challenge: One of the most common challenges of AI, more so for organizations with industry-typical jargon, has been 'human-like' interactions.

The Solution: The AI-powered speech that can be used to not only listen, but also respond to customers. The voice is expressive and unique to an organization's brand. The result is more delightful conversations that are engaging.

Now that it is understood that Riva is an AI-powered Speech toolkit, let's look at what Riva Speech Clients Container.

Riva Speech Clients – What Is It?

Riva Speech Clients is a Docker image that contains sample command-line drivers for the Riva services.

In simple words, Riva is nothing but a GPU-accelerated Software Development Kit aka SDK for building Speech AI applications that are customized as per an organization's use case and deliver real-time performances.

Benefits of Riva Speech

Some of the Benefits of Riva Speech include –

1. State-of-the-Art AI: Riva Speech AI is built on a decade of AI innovations. It has been built across hardware, training techniques, inference optimizations, model architectures, and deployment solutions.

2. Completely Customizable: Riva is fully customizable, implying that organizations have the flexibility. The flexibility ranges from fine-tuning the models to modifying the architectures of the model. With Riva Speech, organizations also have the flexibility to customize their pipelines along with the ability to deploy the models on any platform.

3. Leading Performance: With the continuous optimizations on Riva Speech across the entire stack ranging from models to software to hardware delivered 12 times the gain versus the previous generation.

Riva Speech Functionality

Riva Speech has been depicted as an app-based framework for AI that is multimodal conversational. This implies that the Riva Speech is mode-agnostic and offers responses in human-like voices.

With the focus on low latency – think less than 300 milliseconds – Nvidia wanted Riva Speech to give exceptional performances even with high demands. To better understand the multimodal aspects of Riva, let's have a look at Riva's functionalities.

Functionalities:

· Automatic Speech Recognition aka ASR and Speech to Text aka STT

· Natural Language Understanding aka NLU

· Recognition of Gestures

· Detection of Lip Activity

· Detection of an Object

· Detecting a Gaze and

· Detecting Sentiments

With these functionalities, Riva Speech is set to become a pure Conversational Agent.

Reason: Humans don't just communicate with their voices. There are other subtle signs like a speaker's gaze, their lips' activities, and body gestures.

Another major focus area of Riva Speech is 'transfer learning.' With this focus area, Riva Speech AI can reduce the cost significantly, especially when organizations must take the advanced base models of Riva and repurpose them for use.

Conclusion:

No doubt, Riva Speech AI can help organizations with their brand consistency. This can prove beneficial for the business as it increases customer loyalty. As per research, there are risks involving the potential misuse of Riva Speech AI.

If misused, the technology that can give so much to the community can also prove detrimental to the community. One of the cases of misuse was a case where a CEO's voice is imitated to successfully initiate a wire transfer of USD 243,000 $.

While Nvidia didn't announce any protections to prevent Riva Speech abuse, it has mentioned the don'ts in its terms of services for Riva.   

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Reference Links

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362323995_GAUDI_A_Neural_Architect_for_Immersive_3D_Scene_Generation

https://www.technology.org/2022/07/31/gaudi-a-neural-architect-for-immersive-3d-scene-generation/ 

https://www.patentlyapple.com/2022/08/apple-has-unveiled-gaudi-a-neural-architect-for-immersive-3d-scene-generation.html

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