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

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

#111

Post by tmalsburg2 »

londons_explore wrote: post #105
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #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 hu…

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

This is really cool, thanks for the link, but it solves a different problem.

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

#112

Post by ttsda »

z3t4 wrote: post #107
btian wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

You probably meant micro-SD. And the amount of text content contained in Wikipedia is an atomically sized drop in the Internet's ocean.

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

#113

Post by bufferoverflow »

benjismith wrote: post #54

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…

To me Polly is way behind WaveNet when it comes to realism. Polly is robotic, WN is fluid.

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

#114

Post by ucaetano »

z3t4 wrote: post #99
ucaetano wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The machines used to be the thing of value, but now it's the software. Not exactly. The machines were never the value per se, the work they could do was the value. If you can buy the work without buying the machine, it is significantly better.

Yes, but if you could get it for free that would be even better. It's a fantastic business model to charge premium for something that cost almost nothing.

> Yes, but if you could get it for free that would be even better. It's a fantastic business model to charge premium for something that cost almost nothing.

Cost almost nothing? How much do you think was invested in research and development?

But hey, feel free to open a company, invest billions of your own money in research and then give everything away for free with no revenue whatsoever. Sounds like a great business model!

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

#115

Post by z3t4 »

ucaetano wrote: post #114
z3t4 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but if you could get it for free that would be even better. It's a fantastic business model to charge premium for something that cost almost nothing.

> Yes, but if you could get it for free that would be even better. It's a fantastic business model to charge premium for something that cost almost nothing. Cost almost nothing? How much do you think was invested in research and development? But hey, feel free to open a company, invest billions of your own money in research and then give everything away for free with no revenue whatsoever. Sounds like a great busines…

It does not cost me anything if someone else runs my software. I can still charge for it. The research and development is already paid for. The business plan goes something like this: 1) Buy software 2) Sell copies of it ... But it will not work good if other people start to make copies of it, so you make it a SaaS instead, having the software run in "the cloud" where only you can copy it.

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

#116

Post by ucaetano »

z3t4 wrote: post #115
ucaetano wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but if you could get it for free that would be even better. It's a fantastic business model to charge premium for something that cost almost nothing. Cost almost nothing? How much do you think was invested in research and development? But hey, feel free to open a company, invest billions of your own money in research and then give everything away for free with no revenue whatsoever. Sounds like a great busines…

It does not cost me anything if someone else runs my software. I can still charge for it. The research and development is already paid for. The business plan goes something like this: 1) Buy software 2) Sell copies of it ... But it will not work good if other people start to make copies of it, so you make it a SaaS instead, having the software run in "the cloud" where only you can copy it.

> The research and development is already paid for.

That doesn't even make any sense. They aren't paid for, they are investments with an expectation of future profits. Paid for with shareholder's money.

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

#117

Post by z3t4 »

z3t4 wrote: post #115
ucaetano wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but if you could get it for free that would be even better. It's a fantastic business model to charge premium for something that cost almost nothing. Cost almost nothing? How much do you think was invested in research and development? But hey, feel free to open a company, invest billions of your own money in research and then give everything away for free with no revenue whatsoever. Sounds like a great busines…

It does not cost me anything if someone else runs my software. I can still charge for it. The research and development is already paid for. The business plan goes something like this: 1) Buy software 2) Sell copies of it ... But it will not work good if other people start to make copies of it, so you make it a SaaS instead, having the software run in "the cloud" where only you can copy it.

Investors will be happy as long as the marginal cost to sell one additional copy is above zero. eg. you make a profit. How much they are willing to invest depend of how large the market is.

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

#118

Post by ImJasonH »

ImJasonH wrote: post #23

Quick, 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

Never say I never gave you anything, HN: https://gist.github.com/ImJasonH/78c22b36944b8ec189456e67e63...

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

#119

Post by thesandlord »

thesandlord wrote: post #48
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).

GCP person here. We are aware and are working on a fix! (Should be as "simple" as a polyfill for webcomponents, but I don't want to put words in the team's mouth)

Update: Should be fixed now!

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

#120

Post by lysp »

I picked 3 random paragraphs from a random article on a local online news site.

The voices did sound quite natural and "news-readery", however the one issue I did find is adding a pause between words.

With the example phrase: "He bought himself a boat and then took it to his house". You often expect a small pause after the word "boat".

I was able to manually fix it by adding some commas and full stops, however the AI was not able to pick up those pauses naturally.

It sounded like someone was rushing through the speech instead of stopping occasionally to "take a breath".

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