Live data from Hacker News

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

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

71–80 of 122 posts

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

#71
post #31

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 O…

Is your code on github?

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

#72

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…

Just needs a WebComponents polyfill.

Other browser vendors don't support WebComponents out of the box (yet).

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

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/...

Sure, but should they not be either using polyfills, or not use code that is only supported by one browser? I understand how a project like Allo Web would want to use latest streaming api tech, but a documentation/product launch page doesn't need crazy new web tech.

They should be using the polyfills, but looks like someone missed the mark and forgot to add them.

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

#74
Am I wrong in thinking that the cost of generating (realistic-sounding, learned-model) speech on commodity hardware will be near-zero soon, largely negating the value of a SaaS?

I've been waiting a long time for decent sounding open source TTS software for narrating books to me, and now with deep learning it's either here or very near here, and the hardware is going to keep getting more performant at the same price. I guess that will be very appealing to businesses relying on TTS (e.g. call centers and phone robots and mobile apps with TTS, etc)

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

#75
post #61

It's very good. The voices reminds me of speech from real life people with accents. It's good enough for voice overs where previously real-life voices would be too expensive. I would say that it's better than Amazon's Polly when it's used to read long passages of text.

I don't know. They're good but they still sound robotic. For me, they work for applications where I sort of expect/accept that I'll get computer-generated speech anyway. But I wouldn't use them as a general substitute for a human speaking, even someone like me who doesn't exactly have a radio voice.

It's getting more and more human sounding. Take a look at this research (also from Google): https://research.googleblog.com/2018/03/expressive-speech-sy...

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

#76
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but should they not be either using polyfills, or not use code that is only supported by one browser? I understand how a project like Allo Web would want to use latest streaming api tech, but a documentation/product launch page doesn't need crazy new web tech.

They should be using the polyfills, but looks like someone missed the mark and forgot to add them.

They didn't even test on anything other than Chrome, because they don't care. That's the problem. Not that it was missed, but that they didn't even test in Firefox.

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

#77

Am I wrong in thinking that the cost of generating (realistic-sounding, learned-model) speech on commodity hardware will be near-zero soon, largely negating the value of a SaaS? I've been waiting a long time for decent sounding open source TTS software for narrating books to me, and now with deep learning it's either here or very near here, and the hardware is going to keep getting more performant at the same price.…

Some companies don't ever think in hiring people to build and maintain it, they prefer to pay a subscription like Google Cloud.

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

#78
post #66
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

if they named themselves DeepMind WaveNet Blockchain, they could have acquired Googlebet* by now. * that's how i call google/alphabet when it doesn't matter which side of the tax-avoiding entity i am referring to.

goophabet?

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

#79

Am I wrong in thinking that the cost of generating (realistic-sounding, learned-model) speech on commodity hardware will be near-zero soon, largely negating the value of a SaaS? I've been waiting a long time for decent sounding open source TTS software for narrating books to me, and now with deep learning it's either here or very near here, and the hardware is going to keep getting more performant at the same price.…

What open source TTS is as good as Google Cloud?
Post reply on HN