Are there any voice samples?
[deleted]
Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology
21–30 of 122 posts
Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Edited, made it clear I was talking about companies.
But for most consumers, the same applies. Most people don't want to own records, or even own music. They want to listen to music.
They don't want to own cars, they want to get to places.
> However, it’s impossible to get the same quality for the same amount spent this way, since vendors prefer the service business model.
Not just a matter of preference, but economies of scale. Most consumers don't want to install and run their own local CCTV service, so the market left for those who want is too small to achieve the same economies of scale as the service market.
Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology
#23Quick, someone remake Translation Party using Speech-to-Text-to-Speech-to-Text-to-Speech-ad-infinitum
https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/quickstart https://cloud.google.com/speech/docs/sync-recognize
Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology
#24The 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 :)
Google does a remarkably good job with pronunciation. I'm consistently impressed by it.
I was messing around with the ancient VBA text to speech system. If most TTS systems sucked as much as that one, you could also make a SAAS business for finding "typos" that make the word sound correct when pronounced.
Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology
#25For 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/...
Best viewed with Chrome Explorer™ 5.0, Optimized for 1024x786 truecolor screens.
Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology
#26I wish they had some beautiful voices, not some of the most generic-sounding men and women.
Like Scarlett Johansson's? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n5muEWaE_Q
Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology
#27Google also announced today their Tacotron engine which features new prosody modeling speech generation. It allows them to generate speech that mimics personal intonation, accents, and rhythm, effectively mimicking an individuals "expression" in their speech.
HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16691197
Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology
#28I wish they had some beautiful voices, not some of the most generic-sounding men and women.
We need a virtual Barry White.
Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology
#29Are 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/
If you switch between "Basic" and the "Wavenet" you can hear the difference noted in this announcement, it is noticeably much better.
Re: Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology
#30For 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).
Doesn't work in Safari. Doesn't work in Firefox. Doesn't work in Edge.
I don't want to be unreasonable, but Google used to at least generally support the idea of the open web. There are a bunch of different UAs out there; while I accept it's more challenging to support some than others, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect a product launch from a large-scale web company should at the very least give us an error message.
The web is deteriorating right in front of us, and a big contributor to that is Google's continued failure to realise that the web isn't all-Chrome, all the time. The attitude displayed here—a minor thing when compared to the overall problem—has strengthened my resolve to avoid Chrome at all costs.