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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

#51

Post by matthewmacleod »

thesandlord wrote: post #46
rhizome wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

As I understand it, Chrome does indeed use the Google cloud platform to do its speech synthesis behind the scenes – I suppose we'll see improvements in the quality of those voices soon, too.

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

#52

Post by ucaetano »

z3t4 wrote: post #38
ucaetano wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edited, made it clear I was talking about companies. But for most consumers, the same applies. Most people don't want to own records, or even own music. They want to listen to music. They don't want to own cars, they want to get to places. > However, it’s impossible to get the same quality for the same amount spent this way, since vendors prefer the service business model. Not just a matter of preference, but economi…

The machines used to be the thing of value, but now it's the software.

> 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.

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

#54

Post by benjismith »

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 differences I heard didn't seem to justify a 4x price multiplier.

But I'd love to hear an informed opinion from someone with more expertise...

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

#55

Post by StavrosK »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #50
Gatsky wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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

#58

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

It's very good. The voices reminds me of speech from real life people with accents. It's good enough for voice overs where previously real-life voices would be too expensive. I would say that it's better than Amazon's Polly when it's used to read long passages of text.

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

#59

Post by panarky »

StavrosK wrote: post #56

Is there any API for generating speech that sounds like Google Now's assistant? The quality of that is much, much better than this new service.

Yes, I use this:

https://github.com/pndurette/gTTS

Very simple and has the Google Assistant voice.

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

#60

Post by nl »

daoudc wrote: post #37

I had an idea this morning for a personalised "podcast" that could read out e.g. the weather in your area, any new and important emails, the headlines and first paragraph of top stories from your favourite sources and notifications from social media. I think this is the missing thing that was needed to make this viable.

Try this:

Hey Google, Tell me about my Day.

and

Hey Google, Tell me the news.

There's a way you can get the news added to your daily briefing (the first trigger), but I can't remember how now.

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