Live data from Hacker News

Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

11–20 of 122 posts

Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology

#12
For any Google devs lurking out there, it doesn't seem to work at all in Firefox on Windows. It looks like it has something to do with custom web components with the following message:

ReferenceError: customElements is not defined

Also apparently some assertion errors with webcomponents (minified so line numbers not useful).

Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology

#13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the cloud" is just a better DRM.

How so? They don't sell the model itself, they sell the 'tickets' to allow you to take a picture of it. That is not DRM.

Yes, that’s what the OP is saying. Consumers fought against DRM so the business model became “never give them the software and you’ll never need to force DRM on them.”

Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology

#14
post #5

Are there any voice samples?

You can try it yourself here, just make sure to select English (United States) and Voicetype: Wavenet, as the other languages are not yet using the Wavenet system: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/

It is fun to mismatch voices/languages to hear some hilariously stereotypical accents

Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology

#15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? They don't sell the model itself, they sell the 'tickets' to allow you to take a picture of it. That is not DRM.

Yes, that’s what the OP is saying. Consumers fought against DRM so the business model became “never give them the software and you’ll never need to force DRM on them.”

Except that no companies actually wanted the software in the first place, they wanted the service.

[Edited: made it clear I was talking about companies]

Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology

#16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that’s what the OP is saying. Consumers fought against DRM so the business model became “never give them the software and you’ll never need to force DRM on them.”

Except that no companies actually wanted the software in the first place, they wanted the service. [Edited: made it clear I was talking about companies]

Maybe you did, but I’d much rather have things like the Nest camera or text-to-speech as my own software. However, it’s impossible to get the same quality for the same amount spent this way, since vendors prefer the service business model.

Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology

#18

For any Google devs lurking out there, it doesn't seem to work at all in Firefox on Windows. It looks like it has something to do with custom web components with the following message: ReferenceError: customElements is not defined Also apparently some assertion errors with webcomponents (minified so line numbers not useful).

That's probably because custom elements aren't supported in Firefox yet, unless you set "dom.webcomponents.enabled" and "dom.webcomponents.customelements.enable" to true. It's supposed to be fully enabled in Firefox 60/61 according to MDN [0].

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/...

Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology

#19

The average English word is 4.5 characters and the average English speaker speaks 110-150 words per minute. This means that at $16/1m characters, we can generate speech at a cost between $28.57-39/hr. Per Google's post, WaveNet now costs 50ms of TPU time per 1s of speech generated, meaning, at 100% utilization, a TPU can generate somewhere between $571.40-780/hr. Google's TPUs can be deployed (by third parties) at $6…

Free SAAS business model: transform text by translating each word to its shortest homonym, and take a cut of the cost savings :)
Post reply on HN