Live data from Hacker News

WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

deepmind.com

111–120 of 122 posts

Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think AWS Polly ( https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/polly-text-to-speech-in-47-... ) can do this. I'm not sure of the quality compared to Google's or Apple's TTS though.

Apparently it's semi-decent, thank you!: https://aws.amazon.com/polly/

I was hoping that the voice in the video was created by Polly. That would've been amazing but the samples they provide sound quite robotic.

Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#112

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"…

I've used "Voice Dream" for this for years. It's brilliant. iOS/Android text to speech app: http://www.voicedream.com/reader/ It has so many voices available in the voice store, and I've had no trouble reading books with it. I'm constantly amazed by the quality of some of these voices when played at high speed... They take breaths, express emotion, everything. My only problem is they occasionally mispronounce brands,…

Tried the 3 demos they linked to, the new Google one is so much better, let's hope they follow suite and improve

Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#113
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google's "cloud-based" TTS (not the local one, which was terrible) on the Play Books app was pretty good even years ago. However, it was unusable because it would stop as soon as the screen would turn-off. Other ebook readers' read-aloud features worked with the screen off. So thanks for nothing Google!

It used to stop; it's been well-behaved for at least a year. I use it daily!

Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally said it's launching in the Google Assistant (i.e. running on phones) now. In fact that's the title of the article.

He also missed the speedup by a factor of 10, it's 1000x faster now :) I doubt it's just more hardware, they must have optimized the networks seriously.

Of course they did, I was merely challenging the implied message that it is now 'fast enough', that the speed problem is solved.

Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#115
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently it's semi-decent, thank you!: https://aws.amazon.com/polly/

I was hoping that the voice in the video was created by Polly. That would've been amazing but the samples they provide sound quite robotic.

Yeah, they do, unfortunately :/ Hopefully there will be some improvement they make or some other API that will be able to provide this.

Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#116

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"…

Shameless Plug: https://auditus.cc Uses Amazon Polly for the speech gen

Neat! I'll have to look into this.

Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#117
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was kind of the target of the 2016 Blizzard Challenge ( http://festvox.org/blizzard/blizzard2016.html ), as the training data was children's books (clean audio, 'reading voice' prosody, etc). Some of the voices that came out of that were incredible.

Are any of those voices published? Would be interesting to try rendering audio books with them.

I'm not sure - the exact voices themselves generally aren't published, but the papers are detailed enough that you could recreate the system if you wanted.

Re: WaveNet launches in the Google Assistant

#119
post #67
post #62

I still don't understand the difference between Google Assistant and Google Now (or whatever), other than when I accidentally launch Assistant instead of Now, my commands are never understood.

I don't understand the difference either other than Assistant seems to be replacing Now. The issue, I'm finding, is that Google Assistant requires that you turn on the recording of usage data and history to your account, such as Web & App activity, Location History, Voice & Audio activity. All recorded and tied to your account. I don't believe this was the case with Google Now. Google, to their credit, normally allow…

IIRC one could use Google Now with voice recordings off and the extra-spying setting of "web and app activity" off (though web and app activity had to be on for many features). All this must now be on for the assistant, as you say.

I did try out Google Now for a time due to having an Android Wear watch and found that as time went on more functionality required the turning on of these settings. One particular oddity for a time was that "OK Google, Navigate Home" would produce only a complaint about web and app activity being off, but "OK Google, navigate to $HOME_STREET, $HOME_TOWN" was fine.

I've abandoned Android Wear because of this.

Post reply on HN