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Show HN: Voicera – Add life-like AI voice dictation to your blogs and articles

voicera.co

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Re: Show HN: Voicera – Add life-like AI voice dictation to your blogs and articles

#31

Post by follower »

synesthesiam wrote: post #22
JZL003 wrote: post #10

Anyone have a nice opensource/pretrained TTS model they like using? I use google's wavenet TTS heavily to create 'audiobooks' (especially from archive.org which is great for old books). But it's pretty expensive I periodically look for new versions and, while the examples sound better, they fall down really hard on other text.

You might give Larynx a try: https://github.com/rhasspy/larynx Demo: https://youtu.be/hBmhDf8cl0k (I'm the author)

Wow.

I'd really encourage you to invest some time into SEO and promotion of your project.

I spent a bunch of time recently looking for exactly this: TTS, offline, an Open Source licence, and with "decent"/"natural" sounding default voices.

The "best" I ended up finding was `espeak-ng` but, really, the "natural"-ness is barely comparable to what Larynx seems to produce--based on a quick listen to the demos here: https://rhasspy.github.io/larynx/#en-us

On first impressions at least, Larynx definitely seems to be a project that desires a higher profile in this space.

Thanks for sharing the project here, I'll be interested to take a deeper look when I circle back to my side-side project that could benefit from it. :)

(BTW I didn't watch/listen to the YT video all the way through yet but if the narration is generated by Larynx (which it seemed it might be?) it's definitely worth stating that up front.)

Oh, also, really appreciate that there's multiple options for non-male voices too which is something that seems to be sorely lacking in similar projects.

Re: Show HN: Voicera – Add life-like AI voice dictation to your blogs and articles

#32

Post by sdevonoes »

tirpen wrote: post #20
r_singh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that’s what the software does, it dictates the text…

No, it does the exact opposite. Dictation is writing down what someone is saying. This is software that says what someone writes down.

> Dictation is the transcription of spoken text: one person who is "dictating" speaks and another who is "taking dictation" writes down the words as they are spoken. Among speakers of several languages, dictation is used as a test of language skill, similar to spelling bees in the English-speaking world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictation_(exercise)

Here the software is the "person who is dictating".

Re: Show HN: Voicera – Add life-like AI voice dictation to your blogs and articles

#34

Post by layer8 »

sdevonoes wrote: post #32
tirpen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it does the exact opposite. Dictation is writing down what someone is saying. This is software that says what someone writes down.

> Dictation is the transcription of spoken text: one person who is "dictating" speaks and another who is "taking dictation" writes down the words as they are spoken. Among speakers of several languages, dictation is used as a test of language skill, similar to spelling bees in the English-speaking world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictation_(exercise) Here the software is the "person who is dictating".

It’s not dictation if the spoken text is not recorded or written down by a device (voice recorder) or by a human.

Re: Show HN: Voicera – Add life-like AI voice dictation to your blogs and articles

#35

Post by infinite8s »

follower wrote: post #31
synesthesiam wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might give Larynx a try: https://github.com/rhasspy/larynx Demo: https://youtu.be/hBmhDf8cl0k (I'm the author)

Wow. I'd really encourage you to invest some time into SEO and promotion of your project. I spent a bunch of time recently looking for exactly this: TTS, offline, an Open Source licence, and with "decent"/"natural" sounding default voices. The "best" I ended up finding was `espeak-ng` but, really, the "natural"-ness is barely comparable to what Larynx seems to produce--based on a quick listen to the demos here: https…

Yes agreed, this is great! The best I found that could generate faster than real-time without a GPU was speedyspeech (https://github.com/janvainer/speedyspeech). Unfortunately it was only trained using the LJSpeech dataset and I haven't been able to transfer to a multi-voice model. I have been using it to build an story-telling app for my kids.

Re: Show HN: Voicera – Add life-like AI voice dictation to your blogs and articles

#36

Post by czottmann »

synesthesiam wrote: post #22
JZL003 wrote: post #10

Anyone have a nice opensource/pretrained TTS model they like using? I use google's wavenet TTS heavily to create 'audiobooks' (especially from archive.org which is great for old books). But it's pretty expensive I periodically look for new versions and, while the examples sound better, they fall down really hard on other text.

You might give Larynx a try: https://github.com/rhasspy/larynx Demo: https://youtu.be/hBmhDf8cl0k (I'm the author)

That is ace. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Show HN: Voicera – Add life-like AI voice dictation to your blogs and articles

#37

Post by garduque »

kkielhofner wrote: post #12

I submitted this comment on ProductHunt too but I wanted to make sure you see it: Looks great but FYI there's a long-standing healthcare company that's been in business for over a decade with various speech products/features named "Vocera"[0]. I'm not a lawyer but they have many trademarks on Vocera and the standard is generally "likely to cause confusion". You're probably well in that territory with a speech product…

We use the Vocera hands free devices where I work. At first glance of this title I thought "oh, they do AI dictation stuff, too? I guess that makes sense." And then I noticed the spelling and had the same thought as you. So, ditto.

Re: Show HN: Voicera – Add life-like AI voice dictation to your blogs and articles

#38

Post by busymom0 »

AYBABTME wrote: post #14
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #2

I assume there are a number of Youtube channels doing something like this already - I occasionally notice that an otherwise well-researched and presented item has a non-English idiom - such that even a fluent speaker would self-correct. I guess the idea is to write one and just "release" it in many languages. The point of all that is, yeah, computer generated voice has gotten to the point I need dumb mistakes to real…

And yet apps that leverage this are quasi absent. The Firefox screen reader widget is good but the voices are limited and the functionality limited to well formatted pages. E-book software seems to not integrate this tech either.

My hacker news client HACK has both reader mode for articles as well as read text to speech for articles and comments. It's brand new so feedback is welcome:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h...

Re: Show HN: Voicera – Add life-like AI voice dictation to your blogs and articles

#40

Post by The_Amp_Walrus »

Looks cool! I like the simple implementation.

From a website vistor's perspective: I think an interesting direction would be to offer an asynchronous option (podcast?) for all converted content on a site. I think one reason people want to listen to something rather read is because of the additional freedom that you get when you don't have to pay attention to a screen - eg, you could be walking instead.

That said, I'm not sure what your sell to website owners is. "Engagement" is kind of a vague benefit, why would they want to use this service? What problem is it solving? It's not clear from your landing page why anyone would bother to use this - which (just my opinion) is the #1 problem you need to solve.

I made something similar (https://blogreader.com.au) a while back from the other side - where website readers can choose which blogs they want to listen to. There's also something similar to my site offered by Pocket for free (although I don't like their AI voice very much personally).

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