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WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

deepmind.com

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Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#13

Post by nicklovescode »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #2

I'm interested in using similar generative adversarial networks to reduce artifacting in video streams. For example, highly compressed streams tend to show blocking artifacts on dark scenes, gradients, and static that could be smoothed in the decoder. I haven't actually done much about it yet, but I'm interested.

Adding matching of the laplacian to the optimization could be really helpful for this. I found this paper the other day and really enjoyed it https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01253

Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#15

Post by icc97 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #3

To be honest, it still obviously sounds machine generated. I guess it's a slight improvement, but the examples shown do not include any challenging words or phrases. We've been able to generate adequate sounding speech for simple phrases for quite some time. I bet this was really fun to work on however.

Perhaps I'm just less demanding but I was pretty blown away. Perhaps it sounds robotic but it's coming from the same voice recording. The main difference was how perfectly the words blend together. Now I'm just waiting to get Stephen Fry samples instead.

Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#16

Post by svantana »

While the 100x speedup sounds impressive, a raw speed number without details regarding hardware is pretty meaningless. I'm guessing they got the 20x realtime speed from running it on their new TPU hardware, which they say can do 180 Tflops. That means you would need 9 Tflops of computing power to run this in realtime -- still pretty far away from running on a phone, or PC for that matter.

Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#17

Post by mannigfaltig »

I am wondering what their baseline is. They call it "Current Best Non-WaveNet". Quite frankly, Apple's most recent deep learning-based speech synthesis sounds superior, but there aren't enough samples to for a proper comparison: https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/08/06/siri-voices.htm...

Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#18

Post by DanAndersen »

I'm most interested in its potential for audiobooks, especially of the vast array of old and less-common books that don't have human-made audiobook equivalents. I find myself constrained by the limits of audiobook choices, which tends toward best-sellers lists or pop-sci. Current attempts to use text-to-speech to generate audiobooks results in something that's frankly unlistenable. If TTS could get to a "good enough" point for audiobooks, that would open up a huge range of less-common content.

Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#19

Post by exhilaration »

DanAndersen wrote: post #18

I'm most interested in its potential for audiobooks, especially of the vast array of old and less-common books that don't have human-made audiobook equivalents. I find myself constrained by the limits of audiobook choices, which tends toward best-sellers lists or pop-sci. Current attempts to use text-to-speech to generate audiobooks results in something that's frankly unlistenable. If TTS could get to a "good enough"…

One of my co-workers told me in 2012 that he was doing exactly this. He used an ebook reader to download free ebooks from Gutenberg and then the IVONA text to speech engine for Android to listen to them on his drives. He had already finished a few classics like Treasure Island this way.

I'm sure things have improved significantly since 2012 so what you're looking for is probably easily done.

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