This past week, I decided to start working on a project to build a new type of speech synthesizer. Did I know anything about acoustics or linguistics? No, but I've been reading what I can find about them since then.
I used to have a philosophy of intentionally choosing easy, "overlooked" problems. I figured I wasn't that smart, so I should just stick to the simple stuff. The software I built was good and useful, but a lot of it is already becoming obsolete. I want to make software that will last 50 years, not just 5.
This talk came at a great time for me, and it's strengthened my resolve. I'm going to keep learning about speech synthesis and acoustics (which means a lot of math and physics that I slept through in school), and hopefully I can push the field forward a little bit.
I used to have a philosophy of intentionally choosing easy, "overlooked" problems. I figured I wasn't that smart, so I should just stick to the simple stuff. The software I built was good and useful, but a lot of it is already becoming obsolete. I want to make software that will last 50 years, not just 5.
This talk came at a great time for me, and it's strengthened my resolve. I'm going to keep learning about speech synthesis and acoustics (which means a lot of math and physics that I slept through in school), and hopefully I can push the field forward a little bit.