Amazon Polly – Lifelike Text-To-Speech • Hacker News Board

They say they doesn't charge for royalties for using generated audio. This could be huge for accessibility and alternative forms of media consumption for articles and online media. Generate once, distribute to all.

Re: Amazon Polly – Lifelike Text-To-Speech

#7

Post by jicks » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 4:16 PM UTC

probably_wrong wrote: post #2

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13072944 . For a service claiming to be "lifelike", Joey has totally phrased that question as a statement.

I agree, it doesn't sound "lifelike" at all to me. Compared to WaveNet[1] it's day and night.

[1] https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio...

Re: Amazon Polly – Lifelike Text-To-Speech

#8

Post by sagivo » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 4:17 PM UTC

#offtopic a bit but i wonder if anyone knows a good api for the other-way around -> speech to text

Re: Amazon Polly – Lifelike Text-To-Speech

#9

Post by pawelwentpawel » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 4:18 PM UTC

polskibus wrote: post #3

Congrats to the team behind the release in Gdańsk, Poland!

That's great to hear! I'm from Gdańsk too :) Out of curiosity - any more info about the team behind Amazon Polly?

Re: Amazon Polly – Lifelike Text-To-Speech

#10

Post by tucaz » Wed, Dec 07, 2016, 4:19 PM UTC

I'm a native Portuguese speaker and I can say that this is far from how people speak Portuguese. It sounds like pretty much other TTS solutions.

However, Spanish and English are awesome and really sound like a person. This is great!

Edit: After playing a little bit with it, it does sound better than anything I have seen before even in Portuguese. I believe that the weirdness is just for the standard/demo phrase. When I tried some custom phrases (curse words, mainly) it does sound very natural.