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Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

websitevoice.com

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Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#11

Post by polamam »

txtme wrote: post #5
baroffoos wrote: post #2

Don't have time to test it now. How does it sound? Is it better than the robotic text to speech voice we all know? Wonder if you can run this offline so you can save the files when you build your static site and no scripts are required on the frontend.

The actual text to voice synthesis isn't acutally bad, but the audio quality is terrible. The audio artifacts are so bad I could barely listen to the demo snippets. It's too bad they ruined a quite good product by skimping on the most important quality, audio quality. I wonder how OP missed this? Audio quality has to be flawless when using headphones for extended times. It's not like you need a lot of bits for audio,…

the audio sounds good to me too even with headphones, are you sure you haven't got broken headphones?

Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#12

Post by rosha »

txtme wrote: post #5
baroffoos wrote: post #2

Don't have time to test it now. How does it sound? Is it better than the robotic text to speech voice we all know? Wonder if you can run this offline so you can save the files when you build your static site and no scripts are required on the frontend.

The actual text to voice synthesis isn't acutally bad, but the audio quality is terrible. The audio artifacts are so bad I could barely listen to the demo snippets. It's too bad they ruined a quite good product by skimping on the most important quality, audio quality. I wonder how OP missed this? Audio quality has to be flawless when using headphones for extended times. It's not like you need a lot of bits for audio,…

it sounds great for me too. you must have headphone issues.

Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#15

Post by SeaDude »

Hello, Very interesting. I've been using Edge's built-in voice reading a lot more recently for the exact case you mention on your homepage: listening while working. I have two questions for you after reading your TOS and Privacy Policy. I was expecting to see "you" scraping data from each site or otherwise monetizing the service, but nothing stood out. Either your TOS/PP is incorrect, or you don't have an obvious income stream for the service you are rendering.

So the questions: Who are you? and How are you doing this for free?

Thank you,

Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#19

Post by krackers »

edent wrote: post #18

Is there a demo of the UK voice anywhere? I could only find the American one. Very impressed with the audio quality. What's the revenue model?

>Very impressed with the audio quality

To me it sounds not much better than Google's standard wavenet TTS (seen here: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/) which is admittedly pretty state of the art but nowhere as good as actual human dictation.

Re: Show HN: Convert blog articles to high-quality audio

#20

Post by superfrank »

Just some hopefully constructive criticism, I found the voice used on the "Smart Natural Voice" section to be the most robotic sounding of them all. Specifically, the "Say goodbye to robotic voice, this is nothing like you ever heard before." line sounded very robotic and a bit awkward.

I'm not sure if maybe the content of the copy is a little clunky or if it's the voice itself, but that section sounded worse than the other ones, IMO. If possible, I would think about toying with that. The girl's voice in the "Voice Pitch and Speed Control" section sounded far more natural and impressive.

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