6 ms·
Could 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 audi
by TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Could 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?
- catshirt 10y agoi don't get the response- my comment does not have 98 votes- thought it was some reference i didn't get, or something.
- splike 10y agoI agree that the voice sounds pretty bad, but I think the 'lifelike' part comes from the intelligence part. I.E WA -> Washington, and 75F -> 75 Fahrenheit
- mwcampbell 10y agoText-to-speech systems have been expanding abbreviations for decades, and it always backfires in some cases. For example, DECtalk would expand "Sun" to "Sunday" regardless of context, with the humorous result that blind people reading tech news in the 90s would often hear about Sunday Microsystems. Edit: Yes, that example was unfair, because it's from the 90s (and actually, DECtalk was largely unchanged since the 80s, until it was ruined in the late 90s). Here's a somewhat more recent one: With the ETI-Eloquence engine, which was last updated in 2002, the string "2 Marketing" (which one might find, say, in a Wikipedia table of contents) is expanded to "March twond keting".
- splike 10y agoHence the need for intelligence
- revelation 10y agoWhich it fails miserably at. They probably picked the one example that worked. Someone linked another example here: https://soundcloud.com/zack-bloom/amazons-new-text-to-speech-api https://soundcloud.com/zack-bloom/amazons-new-text-to-speech... And it pronounces 1970s (the decade) as one-thousand-nine-hundred-seven-ths.
- PaulRobinson 10y agoYou're not wrong, but that's still the best real-time TTS sample I've ever heard.
- mwcampbell 10y agoOne blind guy I know opined in the late 90s that it's better to let the brain do the interpreting. But I understand that expansion of abbreviations makes TTS more attractive for mainstream applications.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 10y agoSooo cynical. This is way better than most TTS systems, including Google's. The only one I've ever heard that is better is DeepWave, and that suffers from lots of background noise.
- dharma1 10y agoDo you mean WaveNet? The noisiness is because it uses 8bit (mu-law) audio. 8bit is because WaveNet is computationally extremely expensive. It's pretty much proof of concept at this stage, not production ready TTS.
- visarga 10y agoThere is a faster variant on GitHub, called, of course, Faster-WaveNet.
- SamBam 10y agoSeriously? Compare Polly's English samples (particularly #2) in the original article with the Google's WaveNet samples: Polly 1: https://d0.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/Polly/HelloEnglish-Joanna.mp3 https://d0.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/Polly/HelloEnglis... Polly 2: https://d0.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/Polly/HelloEnglish-Joey.mp3 https://d0.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/Polly/HelloEnglis... WaveNet 1: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/pixie/us-english/wavenet-1.wav https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/pixie/us-engli... WaveNet 2: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/pixie/us-english/wavenet-2.wav https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/pixie/us-engli... There just isn't a comparison -- Polly sounds way more robotic.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 10y agoErr you are agreeing with me. I meant WaveNet not DeepWave (sorry forgot the name).
- bobajeff 10y agoSo I take it that this isn't Amazon's version of Adobe's VoCo or DeepMind's WaveNet.
- dom0 10y agoJoel sounds like Microsoft Sam cleaned his blocked nose. shudders
- awqrre 10y agoIt's more like the opposite of being innovative (unimaginative?)... They bring a product that could previously achieve that locally to a remote server and the quality is not any better.... and they want to charge you by the character... no thanks Amazon... hopefully it's free with Prime.