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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

#41
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I double checked, you are correct: 16 * (4.5 * 110 * 60) / 1M = $0.475/hr 16 * (4.5 * 150 * 60) / 1M = $0.648/hr If you multiply by the number of 50ms in one second (20), you do get $9.5 - $12.96

This is correct. Appols!

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

#43
post #42

Having an English text but setting the language to another one like German or French is hilarious. You get e.g. ze Dscherman aczent or de frensch onehe.

I am ashamed to admit I spent far too much time doing exactly that. The Japanese one really cracked me up.

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

#44

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…

Come on now, it's a cloud machine learning product, you can access it using purely open source tools all running on an open source operating system if you like. No need to pronounce doom because the demo doesn't work in your browser.

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

#45
As someone who struggles greatly with the written words, I'm so thankful to see this. For the last year or so I've poked around every few months to see if they'd opened this up more generally. I'd be more than happy to pay $30-60/mth (more if it had Spritz) for the ability to have high quality, high speech speed, text to speech for my emails, documents and news articles I'd like to consume.

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

#46
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The demo might only work in Chrome, but the API is just a standard REST API. Most people will be using this API on the server side to generate an MP3 which is streamed to the user.

Chrome actually has its own TTS engine (as does FF, Safari, etc), though the quality obviously isn't as good.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SpeechSynth...

(I work for GCP)

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

#47
post #42

Having an English text but setting the language to another one like German or French is hilarious. You get e.g. ze Dscherman aczent or de frensch onehe.

I decided to do the opposite so French text with the wavenet English voice, pretty funny too.

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

#48

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)

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

#49
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not entirely fair – it does work over relatively standard protocols behind the scenes. I'm just annoyed at the lack of care displayed here.

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

#50
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Come on now, it's a cloud machine learning product, you can access it using purely open source tools all running on an open source operating system if you like. No need to pronounce doom because the demo doesn't work in your browser.

I appreciate the quality of the offering, and indeed I'm excited because I am currently building a product that uses Google's synthesis!

But it's the lack of care displayed here that's really disappointing. It's like nobody involved with this demo went "Hey, maybe people aren't using Chrome and we should at least not totally fail when that happens". It's disappointing; as a mostly front-end dev at a small company, I put a lot of time into making sure that things work cross-platform, even if I don't always get it right. It's disappointing that Google's culture doesn't rate that highly enough.

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