Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI Audio Models

openai.fm

41–50 of 317 posts

Re: OpenAI Audio Models

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad I'm not the only one whose inner 12 year old curiosity is immediately triggered by free input TTS. Swear words and just raking my hands across the keyboard to insert gibberish in every possible accent.

It won't generate slurs, though.

what did you try?

Re: OpenAI Audio Models

#42

Hey, I'm Jeff and I was PM for these models at OpenAI. Today we launched three new state-of-the-art audio models. Two speech-to-text models—outperforming Whisper. A new TTS model—you can instruct it how to speak (try it on openai.fm!). And our Agents SDK now supports audio, making it easy to turn text agents into voice agents. We think you'll really like these models. Let me know if you have any questions here!

what data did you use to train these models?

Re: OpenAI Audio Models

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad I'm not the only one whose inner 12 year old curiosity is immediately triggered by free input TTS. Swear words and just raking my hands across the keyboard to insert gibberish in every possible accent.

It won't generate slurs, though.

Seems easy enough to get around with homophonic substitution, though. Didn't refuse any of my tests so far.

Re: OpenAI Audio Models

#44

Hey, I'm Jeff and I was PM for these models at OpenAI. Today we launched three new state-of-the-art audio models. Two speech-to-text models—outperforming Whisper. A new TTS model—you can instruct it how to speak (try it on openai.fm!). And our Agents SDK now supports audio, making it easy to turn text agents into voice agents. We think you'll really like these models. Let me know if you have any questions here!

Do you have plans to make it more realistic like kokoro-82M? I don't know, is it only me or anyone else, machine voice is irritating to me to listen for longer period of time.

https://huggingface.co/hexgrad/Kokoro-82M

Re: OpenAI Audio Models

#45
post #40

I don’t get it. These voices all have a not-so-subtle vibration in them that makes them feel worse than Siri to me. I was expecting a lot better.

yeah the voices sound terrible

I'm guessing their spectral generator is super low res to save on resources

Re: OpenAI Audio Models

#46
post #7

Recommended input for anyone trying this out: Voice: Onyx Vibe: Heavy german accent, doing an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression, way over the top for comedic effect. Deep booming voice, uses pauses for dramatic effect.

Weird; trying exactly this, and every time I stop and play again, I get a totally different voice. One of them (if I'm not mistaken) was cod-Russian.

Re: OpenAI Audio Models

#48
One very important quote from the official announcement:

> For the first time, developers can “instruct” the model not just on what to say but how to say it—enabling more customized experiences for use cases ranging from customer service to creative storytelling.

The instructions are the "vibes" in this UI. But the announcement is wrong with the "for the first time" part: it was possible to steer the base GPT-4o model to create voices in a certain style using system prompt engineering (blogged about here: https://minimaxir.com/2024/10/speech-prompt-engineering/ ) out of concern that it could be used as a replacement for voice acting, however it was too expensive and adherence isn't great.

The schema of the vibes here implies that this new model is more receptive to nuance, which changes the calculus. The test cases from my post behave as expected, and the cost of gpt-4o-mini-tts audio output is $0.015 / minute (https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing ), which is about 1/20th of the cost of my initial experments and is now feasible to use to potentially replace common voice applications. This has implications, and I'll be testing more around more nuanced prompt engineering.

Re: OpenAI Audio Models

#49
If I'm reading the pricing correctly, these models are SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than ElevenLabs.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/pricing

If these are the "gpt-4o-mini-tts" models, and if the pricing estimate of "$0.015 per minute" of audio is correct, then these prices 85% cheaper than those of ElevenLabs.

https://elevenlabs.io/pricing

With ElevenLabs, if I choose their most cost-effectuve "Business" plan for $1100 per month (with annual billing of $13,200, a savings of 17% over monthly billing), then I get 11,000 minutes TTS, and each minute is billed at 10 cents.

With OpenAI, I could get 11,000 minutes of TTS for $165.

Somebody check my math... Is this right?

Re: OpenAI Audio Models

#50
Is this right? The current best TTS from OpenAI uses gpt-4o-audio-preview which is $2.50 input text, $80 output audio, the new gpt-4o-mini-tts is $0.60 input text, $12 output audio. An average 5x price reduction.

Going the other way, transcribe with gpt-4o-audio-preview price was $40 input audio, $10 output text, the new gpt-4o-transcribe is $6 input audio and $10 output text. Like a 7x reduction on the input price.

TTS/Transcribe with gpt-4o-audio-preview was a hack where you had to prompt with 'listen/speak this sentence:' and it often got it wrong. These new dedicated models are exactly what we needed.

I'm currently using the Google TTS API which is really good, fast and cheap. They charges $16 per million characters which is exactly the same as OpenAI's $0.015 per minute estimate.

Unfortunately it's not really worth switching over if the costs are exactly the same. Transcription on the other hand is 1.6¢/minute with Google and 0.6¢/minute with OpenAI now, that might be worth switching over for.

Post reply on HN