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That's great to hear! I'm from Gdańsk too :) Out of curiosity - any more info about the team behind Amazon Polly?
Probably the Ivona team, no? https://www.ivona.com/
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…
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…
Additionally when we speak we don't just 'replay' words; we add emotions and so on. Reminds me of this video [1] analysing how the actor Anthony Hopkins converts his lines to speech for his scenes. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kSGkGKwp9U
I mean, a word or phrase could very much change meaning depending on how its spoken (excitement, disgust, fear, sarcasm etc) and even if the context is available in the text (as is often the case), its rather difficult to machine-detect, at least, for now.
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The male english sample sounds like dragon speech from 10+ years ago, and the female sounded more robotic than others I've heard... I don't see (or hear?) the advance here...
i thought you guys were being either hyperbolic or overly critical. then i heard the demo files.
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I'm not sure about Mandarin, but this is definitely true for Japanese. Near-human Japanese text-to-speech has been around a very long time.
So good they can even sing, and so well that they create entirely virtual pop stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid
PS.That would be one more job lost to AI.
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.
Sooo cynical. This is way better than most TTS systems, including Google's. The only one I've ever heard that is better is DeepWave, and that suffers from lots of background noise.
Polly 1: https://d0.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/Polly/HelloEnglis...
Polly 2: https://d0.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/Polly/HelloEnglis...
WaveNet 1: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/pixie/us-engli...
WaveNet 2: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/pixie/us-engli...
There just isn't a comparison -- Polly sounds way more robotic.
I remember it sounding pretty life-like. Don't know if they expose an API for it, and sell it though. (It would be great if they did.)
Does anyone know why there is a 1000-character limit?
> The size of the input text can be up to 1500 billed characters (3000 total characters). SSML tags are not counted as billed characters. [1]
Not sure where you got 1000 from. As to the why - no. It doesn't seem like too much. 2 minutes of speech maybe in there?