Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by ollin » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 9:07 PM UTC

Does anyone have a GitHub project for epub -> mp3 using this service yet (for automatic audiobook generation)? May make it myself if I have time but curious if anyone already has set it up.

EDIT: this is almost exactly their sample application (https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/python-docs-samples/t...). Was able to get it working with epubs using pypandoc within the hour. Now just need to make it upload to Overcast...

EDIT 2: Can now convert epubs directly to mp3s on Overcast. Yay!

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

#32

Post by tambourine_man » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 9:09 PM UTC

The US English synthesized version is truly remarkable. Borderline scarily good.

The fact that the preview only seems to work on Chrome (and silently breaks everywhere else) is not cool, thought.

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

#33

Post by xiphias » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 9:14 PM UTC

tambourine_man wrote: post #32

The US English synthesized version is truly remarkable. Borderline scarily good. The fact that the preview only seems to work on Chrome (and silently breaks everywhere else) is not cool, thought.

It was funny that I just found your typo after using text-to-speech on your comment :)

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

#34

Post by rhizome » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #30

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #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).

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 mes…

Google used to at least generally support the idea of the open web

Yes, but history teaches us that they are terrible at product management. I mean, they could at least just call it "Chrome TTS" or something until they put the whole thing together.

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

#35

Post by verelo » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 9:17 PM UTC

Is it just me, or would a demo really make this posting much more interesting?

Edit: There is one, on the actual Google Cloud Text-To-Speech page, so a few clicks in and you'll get one.

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

#36

Post by vosper » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 9:19 PM UTC

coryfklein wrote: post #27

Google 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

I find it amusing that here we have all the corporatey buzzwords - "DeepMind WaveNet Technology" - but the other thing is called Tacotron.

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

#37

Post by daoudc » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 9:19 PM UTC

I had an idea this morning for a personalised "podcast" that could read out e.g. the weather in your area, any new and important emails, the headlines and first paragraph of top stories from your favourite sources and notifications from social media.

I think this is the missing thing that was needed to make this viable.

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

#38

Post by z3t4 » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 9:23 PM UTC

ucaetano wrote: post #22

ggg9990 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 economi…

The machines used to be the thing of value, but now it's the software.

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

#39

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 9:25 PM UTC

daoudc wrote: post #37

I had an idea this morning for a personalised "podcast" that could read out e.g. the weather in your area, any new and important emails, the headlines and first paragraph of top stories from your favourite sources and notifications from social media. I think this is the missing thing that was needed to make this viable.

> I had an idea this morning for a personalised "podcast" that could read out e.g. the weather in your area, any new and important emails, the headlines and first paragraph of top stories from your favourite sources and notifications from social media.

Google Assistant already has all the pieces of that (maybe not all the social media connections one might want, I haven't looked much at that), and the ability to string them together.

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

#40

Post by qeternity » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 9:36 PM UTC

teraflop wrote: post #4

qeternity wrote: post #2

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…

I think your math is wrong by a factor of 60. Under your assumptions, one hour of speech is equivalent to 30-40 thousand characters, costing between $0.48-$0.65. That translates to revenue of $9.50-$12.96/hour per TPU.

You're right, I decided to switch from seconds as base unit to hours as base unit half way through writing the comment, and screwed up the conversion. I was accounting for seconds when I was already in minutes.