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

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

#41

Post by follower »

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…

So, after actually watching the demo video all the way through, it seems the video is narrated by a Larynx-produced voice "southern_english_female": https://youtu.be/hBmhDf8cl0k?t=387

While I appreciate the cinematic aspect of the confirmation/"reveal" at the conclusion of the video, ironically--because the quality is so good--since most people won't get through a 7 minute video, it would be entirely possible to not realise the narration itself is generated.

So I'd encourage you to consider stating it a little more up front.

(Also, based on the release dates it seems like this project is relatively young which explains why it's not very well known at this point.)

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

#42

Post by follower »

infinite8s wrote: post #35
follower wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> been using it to build an story-telling app for my kids.

Oh, that's cool! :) Has some overlap with part of my interest in TTS technologies.

The existence of 50 voices for Larynx is definitely a significant part of what makes it an exciting development in this sphere of use.

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

#43

Post by HumanReadable »

pvinis wrote: post #3

Cool idea, but wouldn't it be more useful as a feature for an RSS reader? No user of mine would come to the website and listen, but if they use a reader for my feed and other feeds, that would be useful for them.

I created such an app for myself two years back. It gets fatiguing very quickly to listen to TTS, even when using state of the art stuff like Wavenet Polly.

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

#44

Post by tirpen »

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".

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

And who is the "person who is taking dictation" then? Who is writing down the words the software is speaking?

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

#45

Post by hopesthoughts »

Honestly what's the point of these? I mean sure, if you're driving I suppose, but you probably should be concentrating on driving lol. Also, dictation is what I do with Siri. For people who actually need TTS on a daily, regular basis like me, we have our own, so services like these are pointless.

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

#46

Post by hopesthoughts »

r_singh wrote: post #15
psyc wrote: post #4

The word 'dictation' is confusing here. I think you want 'recitation', 'vocalization', 'narration' or just 'reading'. Dictation is speech-to-text, this is text-to-speech.

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

No, not really. It just reads it. You're basically talking about a screen reader, and we don't use the term dictation.

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

#47

Post by hopesthoughts »

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.

I wouldn't use something like that myself. I use NVDA full time. If you actually need a screen reader, you probably want something more advance than a browser widget. https://www.nvaccess.org/

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

#48

Post by hopesthoughts »

geraneum wrote: post #6

This might be beneficial for visually impaired if the performance (closer to natural voice) is better than the default text-to-speech softwares on the OS. I think this is an important factor. However OS makers can catch up and threaten the business model of this software by integrating a better TTS.

I wouldn't recommend using natural voices to read anything long. They definitely aren't fast enough. Maybe reading short emails and things like that, but when you get to long articles, it takes too much time. I also think that when a voice pauses to breathe it sounds more creepy than natural, and wastes more time, rather than benefits me in any way.

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

#49

Post by AYBABTME »

hopesthoughts wrote: post #47
AYBABTME wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't use something like that myself. I use NVDA full time. If you actually need a screen reader, you probably want something more advance than a browser widget. https://www.nvaccess.org/

I don't _need_ screen readers in so far as I can still read with my eyes, but I can read content quite a lot faster with it, and finish reading stuff I otherwise wouldn't, using spoken text instead.

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

#50

Post by Kriish »

Hey Bloggers & Content Creators, We present you Voicera, a platform that will allow bloggers and content writers to embed life-like voice dictation of their blogs directly into their content. All in one click. They can reach their busy readers via interactive blogs that can speak and increase retention and can run in background.

Extremely simple to use and that too completely FREE.A new era of blogging is here.Don't you miss out content creator. Use KJFPIY code to get extra 2000 credits.

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