Abstract: Techniques for using a language model (e.g., a large language model (LLM)) to generate a natural language response to a user input and prosody information (e.g., voice characteristics associated with a synthetic voice to output the natural language response to the user) are described. The prosody information may correspond to a natural language (e.g., text or tokenized) description, a spectrogram, and/or a latent representation of the voice characteristic(s) associated with the natural language response. In some embodiments, the natural language response and the prosody information may be generated by different portions of layers of the language model. In such embodiments, the output of the layer(s) of the language model configured to generate the natural language response may be provided to the layer(s) of the language model configured to generate the prosody information and the output may be used to generate the prosody information, and vice versa.

Abstract: Methods of and apparatus for Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance (NQR) testing a sample containing quadrupolar nuclei exhibiting a given value of spin-lattice relaxation time, T1, are disclosed. The method comprises applying two excitation blocks to excite nuclear quadrupole resonance, there being a given delay time between the two blocks, detecting resonance response signals, and comparing the response signals from respective blocks. The delay time is less than the T1 value of the nuclei.

Abstract: Methods of and apparatus for Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance (NQR) testing a sample containing quadrupolar nuclei exhibiting a given value of spin-lattice relaxation time, T1, are disclosed. The method comprises applying two excitation blocks to excite nuclear quadrupole resonance, there being a given delay time between the two blocks, detecting resonance response signals, and comparing the response signals from respective blocks. The delay time is less than the T1 value of the nuclei.