Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Super fast/cheap text-to-speech API

unrealspeech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 24 posts

Re: Show HN: Super fast/cheap text-to-speech API

#11

Post by jazz3020 »

doomrobo wrote: post #4

How is this cheaper than Google TTS? Google's standard voices are $4 per million characters. And the deep learning ones are $16 per million characters, same as this offering. Plus Google gives you the first 1M free every month. https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing

OP here. The more you use, the cheaper it gets. But if you're not using much, there isn't any cost-saving benefits.

Once you scale to ~60M characters per month, it's 50% cheaper. In other words, if you're at a stage where you spend $1,000/mo on text-to-speech, you'd spend $500/mo instead.

Re: Show HN: Super fast/cheap text-to-speech API

#12

Post by jazz3020 »

aragonite wrote: post #2

Very impressive. I tested it with: In Sioux City the Taoiseach parked his coupe by the quay overlooking a fjord. Nearby, a bugle played an octave, children savored sherbet and quinoa with acai, and an artisan sold bagels next to ancient-inspired rouge. And it got most of the (irregularly spelt) words pronounced correctly except for 'quinoa' and 'acai'. Just for fun, I also tested some tongue twisters. For some reason…

OP here. Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, those are some pretty tough sentences (obviously not in the dataset). The tongue twister one is really interesting.

Re: Show HN: Super fast/cheap text-to-speech API

#13

Post by jazz3020 »

latexr wrote: post #10

The pitch slider works in increments of 0.01 but for some reason we can’t set 1.0, it jumps from 0.99 to 1.01. Same with the speed slider, it goes from -1% to +1%, no 0% (or “Normal” as you call it when the page is refreshed).

Oh, interesting. What browser are you using? I'm able to set to 0.

Re: Show HN: Super fast/cheap text-to-speech API

#16

Post by latexr »

jazz3020 wrote: post #14
pcdoodle wrote: post #9

My computers fans ramped up visiting your site.

Ah, that must be because of the render in the background. Maybe we should turn that off.

> Maybe we should turn that off.

Definitely. Even on an M1 it made the page sluggish. I could feel its effect by moving the slider. When I deleted the div.glow-animation with the browser’s DevTools, it became way snappier.

Re: Show HN: Super fast/cheap text-to-speech API

#17

Post by latexr »

jazz3020 wrote: post #13
latexr wrote: post #10

The pitch slider works in increments of 0.01 but for some reason we can’t set 1.0, it jumps from 0.99 to 1.01. Same with the speed slider, it goes from -1% to +1%, no 0% (or “Normal” as you call it when the page is refreshed).

Oh, interesting. What browser are you using? I'm able to set to 0.

Safari on macOS.

Re: Show HN: Super fast/cheap text-to-speech API

#18

Post by JZL003 »

If you did give a pay as you go, price per character I'd be very interested. I know small-medium scale personal use isn't necessarily your target but I turn a lot of audiobooks into audio. Even on big months it's only 1-1.5 million characters

Or even if I could buy 1 month and then use those credits over multiple successive months I would really start considering it. It's nicer on my ears than even GCP's new neural voices, and I've listened to over 1k hours over the past year or two

Re: Show HN: Super fast/cheap text-to-speech API

#19

Post by JZL003 »

JZL003 wrote: post #18

If you did give a pay as you go, price per character I'd be very interested. I know small-medium scale personal use isn't necessarily your target but I turn a lot of audiobooks into audio. Even on big months it's only 1-1.5 million characters Or even if I could buy 1 month and then use those credits over multiple successive months I would really start considering it. It's nicer on my ears than even GCP's new neural v…

Also 1M one time does go very fast compared to GCP's 1M per month

Re: Show HN: Super fast/cheap text-to-speech API

#20

Post by crackedbassoon »

jazz3020 wrote: post #11
doomrobo wrote: post #4

How is this cheaper than Google TTS? Google's standard voices are $4 per million characters. And the deep learning ones are $16 per million characters, same as this offering. Plus Google gives you the first 1M free every month. https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing

OP here. The more you use, the cheaper it gets. But if you're not using much, there isn't any cost-saving benefits. Once you scale to ~60M characters per month, it's 50% cheaper. In other words, if you're at a stage where you spend $1,000/mo on text-to-speech, you'd spend $500/mo instead.

Do you support SSML and other languages besides English? The demo site suggests not, and I couldn’t explore further without signing up.

This service might be cheaper than Google at scale, but if I needed 60M chars a month I’d probably care about those features.

Post reply on HN