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What do you see as the business use case for more realistic text-to-speech? We use TTS extensively within the Pantelligent iOS and Android apps, and it's somet

What do you see as the business use case for more realistic text-to-speech? We use TTS extensively within the Pantelligent iOS and Android apps, and it's something our users requested and get a lot of value out of. It seems like the existing solutions are already good enough / dramatically above the threshold of usefulness for an interactive real-time-guidance application like ours, and just keep getting better from the OS side.

jrcii 11y ago
It seems that IVR phone systems could benefit. Maybe the state-of-the-art just hasn't had the chance to propagate, but it always strikes me as inelegant when I hear, "Your account has a balance of... ONE, HUN-DRED, DOLLARS... AND... NINETY, FIVE, CENTS. To pay this bill,"
- joegreen 11y ago
  I've just tried playing "Your account has a balance of 100 dollars and 95 cents" on https://www.ivona.com/us/ https://www.ivona.com/us/ and it seems quite natural to me (but I'm not a native english speaker so I may not be sensitive).
  - ctomaybe 11y ago
    Just spent more time than I would like to admit making those voices say all matter of inappropriate things and giggling to myself.
    - praccu 11y ago
      Did you try the chipmunk voice?
  - 0942v8653 11y ago
    There are 2 types of text-to-speech system: - The "bank" one referenced above: this is made of short recordings of a real person saying the words or phrases, cut up and then concatenated. For some messages they sound exactly like a real person (because all it does is play a single recording), but when numbers are inserted, the above characterization is quite accurate. There is no effort to make the inflection fit properly in a sentence or have it sound natural. - ivona.com and OS X `say`. These generate audio in real time, and may have a few samples but are generally created on-the-fly according to what is around the text. This is where the research is at right now, but the main problem is the CPU required to generate these. Your car, or Madden 2015, or the bank might not want to use up too much CPU time to make their audio sound like that.
- mchahn 11y ago
  In the late sixties I was programming at a bank and even then there was a voice response account-balance phone number. The machine was quite large, about the size of two refrigerators. It had twelve different loops of tape that spun around. Each tape had one digit or word. It sounded exactly as you describe.
- Someone 11y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me if that were a minefield of liability, or if there was research that shows that doing it that way makes the message more intelligible. Either way, the incentive for the bank to change things must be minute.
bossx 11y ago
We build video content and localize it in multiple languages, we use voice artists to record the audio for this content, obviously this has scalability issues. We would use TTS if we could find an engine that sounded more like a human and less like a computer, but from our testing of various engines (including the ones posted in the comments) they don't come close to sounding like humans. We are just one business case in a huge sea of opportunity.

jrcii 11y ago

It seems that IVR phone systems could benefit. Maybe the state-of-the-art just hasn't had the chance to propagate, but it always strikes me as inelegant when I hear, "Your account has a balance of... ONE, HUN-DRED, DOLLARS... AND... NINETY, FIVE, CENTS. To pay this bill,"

joegreen 11y ago
I've just tried playing "Your account has a balance of 100 dollars and 95 cents" on https://www.ivona.com/us/ https://www.ivona.com/us/ and it seems quite natural to me (but I'm not a native english speaker so I may not be sensitive).
- ctomaybe 11y ago
  Just spent more time than I would like to admit making those voices say all matter of inappropriate things and giggling to myself.
  - praccu 11y ago
    Did you try the chipmunk voice?
- 0942v8653 11y ago
  There are 2 types of text-to-speech system: - The "bank" one referenced above: this is made of short recordings of a real person saying the words or phrases, cut up and then concatenated. For some messages they sound exactly like a real person (because all it does is play a single recording), but when numbers are inserted, the above characterization is quite accurate. There is no effort to make the inflection fit properly in a sentence or have it sound natural. - ivona.com and OS X `say`. These generate audio in real time, and may have a few samples but are generally created on-the-fly according to what is around the text. This is where the research is at right now, but the main problem is the CPU required to generate these. Your car, or Madden 2015, or the bank might not want to use up too much CPU time to make their audio sound like that.
mchahn 11y ago
In the late sixties I was programming at a bank and even then there was a voice response account-balance phone number. The machine was quite large, about the size of two refrigerators. It had twelve different loops of tape that spun around. Each tape had one digit or word. It sounded exactly as you describe.
Someone 11y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if that were a minefield of liability, or if there was research that shows that doing it that way makes the message more intelligible. Either way, the incentive for the bank to change things must be minute.

bossx 11y ago

We build video content and localize it in multiple languages, we use voice artists to record the audio for this content, obviously this has scalability issues. We would use TTS if we could find an engine that sounded more like a human and less like a computer, but from our testing of various engines (including the ones posted in the comments) they don't come close to sounding like humans. We are just one business case in a huge sea of opportunity.