dtgreene: I believe it did sound like her, but to my understanding it didn't have the same amount of expression and enthusiasm that her actual voice would have had. Also, it still had a bit of an expressionless robotic quality to it.
botan9386: Fair enough.
What makes AI convincing to me is not neceessarily the way it sounds though, it's how it responds to things. This is one situation I had which felt surreal:
AI was talking > I accidentally interrupted it > AI stopped talking > I apologised just by impulse > AI acknowledged the apology and continued talking just like a real person would.
We all know that what we're talking to is actually just a bunch of code but little things like that which mimic human behaviour are what make it feel authentic.
In this particular case, the AI wasn't used to generate the words of the reply, but rather to turn them into am approximation of her voice. She wrote the replies to the questions ahead of time, and they were then turned into audio clips via AI.
In fact, there was a last minute question at the end that they must not have had time to convert to AI, so they just had the person asking the question read her response.
Hence, the whole issue of how the AI responds to things was sidestepped because the AI was not put in that situation.
I suspect this sort of AI usage might be useful for anyone who ends up disabled in a manner similar to Stephen Hawking; he couldn't talk, so they had to give him an artificial voice. While his artificial voice had a robotic sound to it, we now have the technology to make the voice sound like it did before the disability set in. (Only one problem; for this to work, the AI needs to be able to run in real-time on a computer small and light enough to be carried around or embedded in a wheelchair.)