To me this is very exciting. I'm already working on my own home digital assistant modeled as NeNe Leaks from the Real Housewives to add personality to otherwise boring conversations with a robot. I've been looking at various style transfer techniques, and having something a bit more plug & play will help me focus on the more unique parts. I predict that we'll see more celebrity voices used as conversational interfaces become more common.<p>Part of the complexity is going from 'context-free phonemes' to actually modeling personality. Having some way for the voice to know how to embed emotion, and ideally contextually from the sentences themselves. NeNe is an interesting example as she adds so many non-verbal sounds to her dialog (bleeps and bloops and eye rolls that she translates into affected speech). That's part of what makes her NeNe, and a big part of the entertaining value. Pursuing that is what will bring style transfer to the next level... total personality emulation. I fantasize about basic animatronics that can move her head side to side, twirl, and literally give eye rolls.<p>If anyone wants to work on this with me, give me a ping @azinman on twitter. I've currently been thinking about this as an open source project, but still holding out options as I continue development. I've got a ton more ideas she's integrating into with my bleeding edge smart home, far more than just personality emulation (including what I believe to be a breakthrough in passive context-sensing.. the real key to making the smart home actually smart).