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Could we drop “Lifelike” from the title? It's marketing puffery (and untrue, it sounded very robotic to me to the point I was convinced I'd heard the wrong audio file). The actual story is that it's Amazon's text-to-speech-as-a-service offering, not that it's particularly innovative in terms of sounding good.
I don't see (or hear?) the advance here...
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...
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...
One thing I always still notice about these "lifelike" speech models is that they still have random pitch variation that wouldn't be present from a real speaker—sort of a "warbling", similar to audio heavily compressed by some cellular realtime audio codecs. I assume this is due to random variation in the pitches the speakers in the training data used to say given phonemes. Would this, then, imply that speech models…
This experiment does cover the "generic computer voice" role quite well, but customers don't want that on e.g. their website. I would want a "I'm a professional designer" voice. So there will always be markets for more appropriate voices [*]. But this one does sound very nice at what it does.
The same will happen with robots, btw. Once we get a generic humanoid robot that can do everything, we will still seek aesthetic variations and employ remote body actors.
#offtopic a bit but i wonder if anyone knows a good api for the other-way around -> speech to text