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Amazon Polly – Lifelike Text-To-Speech
- probably_wrong 10y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13072944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13072944. For a service claiming to be "lifelike", Joey has totally phrased that question as a statement.
- jicks 10y agoI agree, it doesn't sound "lifelike" at all to me. Compared to WaveNet[1] it's day and night. [1] https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/ https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio...
- j2kun 10y agoThe "babbling" samples here are really fun. Would make for a great "Sims" language.
- justusthane 10y agoI actually found that pretty unsettling to listen to, and verging on creepy. I felt like I was listening to a computer trying to pretend to be human.
- Vinkekatten 10y agoWow, that was actually impressive. A few of those were hard to distiguish from human speakers. I love how they included breathing and mouth-sounds as well, really brings it to life.
- polskibus 10y agoCongrats to the team behind the release in Gdańsk, Poland!
- pawelwentpawel 10y agoThat's great to hear! I'm from Gdańsk too :) Out of curiosity - any more info about the team behind Amazon Polly?
- jeffehobbs 10y agoProbably the Ivona team, no? https://www.ivona.com/ https://www.ivona.com/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- aantix 10y agoIf you want to play around with it.. https://console.aws.amazon.com/polly/home/SynthesizeSpeech https://console.aws.amazon.com/polly/home/SynthesizeSpeech
- godmodus 10y agoDanish is good, the rest sound not so very lifelike.
- kalleboo 10y agoThe Danish doesn't sound very good to me, compared to Apple's voices
- soheil 10y agoIn case anyone would like to hear what it sounds like: http://vocaroo.com/i/s1mM3ExvMuwC http://vocaroo.com/i/s1mM3ExvMuwC To play around with it: https://console.aws.amazon.com/polly/home/SynthesizeSpeech https://console.aws.amazon.com/polly/home/SynthesizeSpeech
- benjaminjosephw 10y agoThey say they doesn't charge for royalties for using generated audio. This could be huge for accessibility and alternative forms of media consumption for articles and online media. Generate once, distribute to all.
- sagivo 10y ago#offtopic a bit but i wonder if anyone knows a good api for the other-way around -> speech to text
- ckluis 10y agoShoot - I'd love an API you pass in txt in one language and get multiple languages back in txt and speech.
- shiftpgdn 10y agoAmazon Lex and Google's GCE offer this.
- yoyo_paolo 10y agoHello
- yoyo_paolo 10y agoHello
- Vinkekatten 10y agoI've never tried it myself as an api but a quick poke around the googles throws this out https://cloud.google.com/speech/ https://cloud.google.com/speech/
- athenot 10y agoShameless plug: check out Tropo[1]: you can interface with SIP. One thing to keep in mind regarding speech to text: if you need accuracy, it helps immensely if you can guide the recognizer with a list of expected answers. Un-hinted transcription will do its best to recognize words but without AI to understand the context, there are still quite a few possibilities for mis-recognition. More info about these two here[2]. [1] https://www.tropo.com https://www.tropo.com [2] https://www.tropo.com/docs/voice/transcription-vs-speech-recognition-asr https://www.tropo.com/docs/voice/transcription-vs-speech-rec... (Full disclaimer: I'm in the Tropo BU)
- tcarey83 10y ago
- tucaz 10y agoI'm a native Portuguese speaker and I can say that this is far from how people speak Portuguese. It sounds like pretty much other TTS solutions. However, Spanish and English are awesome and really sound like a person. This is great! Edit: After playing a little bit with it, it does sound better than anything I have seen before even in Portuguese. I believe that the weirdness is just for the standard/demo phrase. When I tried some custom phrases (curse words, mainly) it does sound very natural.
- skzo 10y agoAlso the sample text in Portuguese has a bad construction
- twoquestions 10y agoGiven that this supports Speech Synthesis Markup Language [0], I wonder what the impact will be on positions that talk for a living. While this is unlikely to replace voice actors for games/cartoons, I wonder if public service announcers and such will be replaced by this robot. https://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis/ https://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis/
- derefr 10y agoOne thing I always still notice about these "lifelike" speech models is that they still have random pitch variation that wouldn't be present from a real speaker—sort of a "warbling", similar to audio heavily compressed by some cellular realtime audio codecs. I assume this is due to random variation in the pitches the speakers in the training data used to say given phonemes. Would this, then, imply that speech models for tonal languages like Mandarin don't share this problem, since people are speaking with prescribed pitches more often?
- chrismealy 10y agoI was wondering why it sometimes sounded like bad compression artifacts! Thanks.
- iainmerrick 10y agoSheer speculation, but I wonder if that could be related to the "checkerboarding" artifacts you almost always see in AI-generated images? Here's a good writeup: http://distill.pub/2016/deconv-checkerboard/ http://distill.pub/2016/deconv-checkerboard/
- derefr 10y agoRe: the checker-boarding artifacts, that sounds interestingly like deconvolutional NNs treat their samples, at each deconv layer, as independent, rather than taking the Rule of Addition of probability-weights (P(A ∪ B) = P(A) + P(B) - P(A ∩ B)) into account. (Would a model that did do this then be a "Bayesian Deconvolutional Neural Network"? Does that even make sense?) I doubt this would result in audible artifacts at the audio level, though. The visual checkerboarding appears at the 1px detail-level of the output image—this would translate more to minor fluctuations along an audio sample's Nyquist frequency, which is effectively undetectable if the output sampling rate is of the usual kind (44.1kHz).
- wjnc 10y agoI always wonder why they don't program a second pass over the output with a model, say, trained on radio conversations. That second model just for audio 'quality'.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoCould we drop “Lifelike” from the title? It's marketing puffery (and untrue, it sounded very robotic to me to the point I was convinced I'd heard the wrong audio file). The actual story is that it's Amazon's text-to-speech-as-a-service offering, not that it's particularly innovative in terms of sounding good.
- jmcdiesel 10y agoThe male english sample sounds like dragon speech from 10+ years ago, and the female sounded more robotic than others I've heard... I don't see (or hear?) the advance here...
- catshirt 10y agoi thought you guys were being either hyperbolic or overly critical. then i heard the demo files.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago98 upvotes? Huh?
- BoorishBears 10y agoHow can you tell?
- hacker_9 10y agoEnglish speakers sound brain dead to be honest. This sounds no different from pre-NN attempts, only difference this time is it's behind an Amazon paywall.
- avita1 10y agoInteresting to hear Danish and Icelandic. Does the language affect how difficult it is to get realistic sounds?
- chillingeffect 10y agoThe thing these voices always miss is context. We need about 700 variations of every textual sentence that all depend on the mood or goal of the conversation and modulate pitch, volume, speed, word choice, etc. appropriately. This experiment does cover the "generic computer voice" role quite well, but customers don't want that on e.g. their website. I would want a "I'm a professional designer" voice. So there will always be markets for more appropriate voices [*]. But this one does sound very nice at what it does. The same will happen with robots, btw. Once we get a generic humanoid robot that can do everything, we will still seek aesthetic variations and employ remote body actors.
- xwowsersx 10y agoDoes anyone know why there is a 1000-character limit?
- niklasrde 10y agoIt says > The size of the input text can be up to 1500 billed characters (3000 total characters). SSML tags are not counted as billed characters. [1] Not sure where you got 1000 from. As to the why - no. It doesn't seem like too much. 2 minutes of speech maybe in there? [1]http://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/limits.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/limits.html
- aerialcombat 10y agoI'm sorry, but lifelike? Not yet. More like better robot.
- lottin 10y agoThe female Spanish speaker has a strong Scandinavian accent.
- pkfrank 10y agoHow is directly linking a .mp3 the best way to preview their technology? You'd think there would be a much more elegant solution to showcase Polly on their site.
- drchiu 10y agoThe speech that's generated still sounds relatively artificial. This is in comparison with Adobe's tech where it samples a real human voice and allows speech to be inserted (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/adobe-voco-photoshop-for-audio-speech-editing/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/adobe-...).
- pantulis 10y agoA little bit on the underwhelming side, specially given the "lifelike" moniker. But it seems pretty useful otherwise. What are the competing services?
- zackbloom 10y agoHere's a sound clip of one of the voices I pulled, if you'd like to hear it: https://soundcloud.com/zack-bloom/amazons-new-text-to-speech-api https://soundcloud.com/zack-bloom/amazons-new-text-to-speech...
- martythemaniak 10y agoThe demo files in the article sound pretty decent, but this sample is pretty bad. It sounds pretty robotic by itself (lots of artifacts, odd pitches, no pauses), but saying "during the one thousand nine hundred and seventies" is the real kicker.
- jeena 10y agoI really like text2speech because I really like the computer to read articles to me while I'm doing something else, but I won't use any internet service for that just to get a little bit more quality in comperison to Apples "Alex" or MeryTTS http://mary.dfki.de/ http://mary.dfki.de/
- visarga 10y agoMe too. I usually play Reddit and HN on Alex voice. It's the best instantly accessible voice on Mac, even though it is quite old.
- mgamache 10y agoThere's a lot of negative reaction to Polly. Besides WaveNet (which is not available as an API-- and really slow), what are better alternatives? Or is the reaction just to Amazon's marketing speak using "lifelike" and "deep learning"? I find most of the voices to be okay, but Joanna is pretty good and better then anything I've heard besides WaveNet. Also, with Amazon's FPGA investment how long before it implements WaveNet using FPGA's to reduce the speech generation time to something that is realtime?
- mtgx 10y agoWhy would Google use FPGAs over its own (faster) TPUs? Chances are Google either doesn't have enough TPUs (it may be waiting on the next generation to go massive scale with them), or Wavenet is still too computationally intensive even for TPUs.
- mgamache 10y agoI am sure Google is looking at WaveNet & TPUs, I was just thinking Amazon would look at using its new massive FPGAs to implement WaveNet. I have no idea if the FPGAs would be fast enough.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ausjke 10y agoI assume now you can use LEX + Polly to make your own Echo. Google, IBM and Microsoft all have invested way more in AI already and are actually way ahead of Amazon technically. However Amazon now becomes the first one that makes these technologies really approachable for ordinary developers. Way to go Amazon!
- antirez 10y agoOld style TTS quality + Marketing blablaing. It's more costly since you pay the blablaing.
- shams93 10y agoI'm more excited about the html5 tts API than these services when it runs in the browser the cost is $0. The costs if these 3rd party APIs add up and add latency to your app.
- dgudkov 10y agoIn our team nobody speaks English as first language. Now we have to hire actors for English voice narration in our demo videos. If Amazon Polly gets better, we might be able to switch to synthesized voice narration and don't deal with actors anymore. PS.That would be one more job lost to AI.
- winter_blue 10y agoHasn't Google had a Text-to-Speech service (for e.g. the speaker button in the Google Translate page) that's been around for aeons? I remember it sounding pretty life-like. Don't know if they expose an API for it, and sell it though. (It would be great if they did.)
- kalleboo 10y agoThose samples are absolutely terrible. The idea of applying machine learning to add natural emphasis to speech is a good one, but seeing how language machine learning systems like Google Translate fail on very basic contextual cues, I don't have much hope... Especially when their demo samples are on par with systems from a decade ago. I'll stick to Bruce.
- bckmn 10y agoFor anyone interested in using something like this to listen to articles/text, you should check out https://narro.co https://narro.co
- xbryanx 10y agoI'm curious what some of the industrial or business use cases are for a service like this. I'm not saying there aren't any, I just wonder who this scratches and itch for.