Live data from Hacker News

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

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

101–110 of 122 posts

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

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is simple: Get as many people as you can to migrate to Firefox!

Then it works in two browsers: most popular and their own. Ideally there would be such a large number of in-use standards compliant browsers that companies had to comply.

There are four or five out there. I would expect the average modern web app to be compatible with Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, and possibly IE11 if that’s appropriate for the particular use case.

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

#102

Interesting! I'd love to see a thorough comparison with the Amazon Polly service... https://aws.amazon.com/polly/ Polly is priced at $4 per million characters and the Google WaveNet voices are $16 (compared with the Google non-WaveNet voices, which are also $4). After listening to a few samples from each service, the voice quality and prosody modeling seem roughly on par between Polly and WaveNet, or at least the dif…

A lot of voice generation is cost-center (call center that are outsourced to cheapest location) with short sentences. I doubt industry would pay 4x price multiplier for that use-case.

So in fact WaveNet competes more with voiceover and new use-cases such as voice assistants. Still I don't hear that much difference there today, but maybe WaveNet will improve in the future to human level sooner than the other models.

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

#103
I'm using Amazon Polly for a few of months to make videos for language learners. And I realize English voices powered by WaveNet slightly better than those of Amazon but the default Japanese sounds way too worse. Anyway, their pricing and platform are almost same with Amazon, so I definitely need to add another interface for this TTS into my app. You can listen to Amazon Polly voices with the video I made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysMp0k4oR5c

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

#104
This is great, but there remain very difficult problems to be solved. The prosody generated by this is fairly generic and not informed by a true understanding of the text. Consider this sentence:

I have plans to leave.

If you stress the word "plans", the sentence means that the speaker is not necessarily intending to actually leave. However, when the stress is on "leave", the speaker definitely intends to leave. A human reader can easily infer the correct meaning from context but text-to-speech systems can't because they don't have any systematic understanding of the things being talked about and the social pragmatics of the discourse. As long as these issues aren't solved, text-to-speech systems will make mistakes. These mistakes will be easy to spot in some cases but can also have catastrophic consequences in other cases: "I have plans to bomb North Korea."

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

#105

This is great, but there remain very difficult problems to be solved. The prosody generated by this is fairly generic and not informed by a true understanding of the text. Consider this sentence: I have plans to leave. If you stress the word "plans", the sentence means that the speaker is not necessarily intending to actually leave. However, when the stress is on "leave", the speaker definitely intends to leave. A hu…

Google has solved that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16692559

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

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is simple: Get as many people as you can to migrate to Firefox!

Then it works in two browsers: most popular and their own. Ideally there would be such a large number of in-use standards compliant browsers that companies had to comply.

The problem isn't so much that browser vendors don't adhere to standards, it's that they make their own additional features and then make webpages that work with those. Having standards won't do anything for that, unless the standard says "you must not implement extra functionality".

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

#107
post #95
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.”

That's a very cynical interpretation. Even if Google wants to sell websearch software, there will be so few customers since it would cost billions of dollars to buy machines to run them, you'll need to build DC, get power etc. And what's wrong with services anyway?

Google have infrastructure to to serve billions of requests per second, that is not be needed if you only serve yourself. Now imagine if every-one would scrape the web as often as Google does. :P

Your mobile phone can run some billions of instructions per second. Now imagine a server case, or a rack. Compute power is very dense. And very cheap.

The entire wikipedia (text only) can be stored on a micro-sim. eg a few mm.

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

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What open source TTS is as good as Google Cloud?

check the "kate" samples: https://github.com/Kyubyong/speaker_adapted_tts This is with 1 minute of audio and 10 minutes of training, which is crazy to me. Maybe it's not "as good", but it's very good, and free, and it will get better, faster, and cheaper quickly?

Partially off-topic, but one of the things I find as a native English-speaking American is that British female accents (probably more specifically accents that are close to a "BBC accent") sound better to me. That's definitely true with Polly. I don't know if it's because flaws aren't quite as obvious to me or just that I like the accent better in general so I'm more willing to overlook them.

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

#109

Here's a simple Python script that will fetch some sample audio using the request on the demo page and save it in a file: https://www.pastery.net/nujfhw/ I have no idea what the rate limits are, so please don't abuse it, I wrote it because the demo didn't work in Firefox and I wanted to play around with it more extensively.

Thanks, pretty neat script; works nicely!
Post reply on HN