5 ms·

I 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

by splike 10y ago

mwcampbell 10y ago
Text-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 ago
  Hence the need for intelligence
  - revelation 10y ago
    Which 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 ago
      You're not wrong, but that's still the best real-time TTS sample I've ever heard.
    - mwcampbell 10y ago
      One 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.
    - hosh 10y ago
      I was looking around for samples, and this is the only sample I have heard so far. I think that sounds pretty good. The emotional tone is off, but it is a lot better than say, Siri (which I understand was designed to sound robotic to highlight the tech). But I'm also the guy who has had my MBP announce the hour and it has freaked out coworkers. I don't know if this is crossing into uncanny valley territory. I think some of this is not being used to it. Google Map's driving voice sounds subtly better than that voice sample. I'm looking forward to seeing if a similar service is coming for GCP.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  I know a guy who's abbreviated middle name consistently gets pronounced as "street"
tyingq 10y ago
> the 'lifelike' part comes from the intelligence part. I.E WA -> Washington, and 75F -> 75 Fahrenheit This would drive me nuts, as there's no easy way to predict what sort of transformations it would make. Basically, if it's not near perfect, it's arguably worse than no intelligence at all. With our PBX stuff, I know it's dumb, so I'm already accustomed to giving it something I know it will read correctly, like "domain dot com".
- nkozyra 10y ago
  > This would drive me nuts, as there's no easy way to predict what sort of transformations it would make. I believe that's what the Lexicons are for within the service.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    If all of the auto transformations are defined Lexicons, that can be edited/removed, that would be fine. I read the post I was replying to as some sort of undefined, built-in, set of intelligent transformations. For example, 75F-> 75 Fahrenheit would require that you make a Lexicon entry for every value...1F, 2F, 3F, etc. That's not really intelligent :)

I 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

by splike 10y ago

I 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 ago

Text-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 ago
Hence the need for intelligence
- revelation 10y ago
  Which 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 ago
    You're not wrong, but that's still the best real-time TTS sample I've ever heard.
  - mwcampbell 10y ago
    One 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.
  - hosh 10y ago
    I was looking around for samples, and this is the only sample I have heard so far. I think that sounds pretty good. The emotional tone is off, but it is a lot better than say, Siri (which I understand was designed to sound robotic to highlight the tech). But I'm also the guy who has had my MBP announce the hour and it has freaked out coworkers. I don't know if this is crossing into uncanny valley territory. I think some of this is not being used to it. Google Map's driving voice sounds subtly better than that voice sample. I'm looking forward to seeing if a similar service is coming for GCP.
kalleboo 10y ago
I know a guy who's abbreviated middle name consistently gets pronounced as "street"

tyingq 10y ago

> the 'lifelike' part comes from the intelligence part. I.E WA -> Washington, and 75F -> 75 Fahrenheit This would drive me nuts, as there's no easy way to predict what sort of transformations it would make. Basically, if it's not near perfect, it's arguably worse than no intelligence at all. With our PBX stuff, I know it's dumb, so I'm already accustomed to giving it something I know it will read correctly, like "domain dot com".

nkozyra 10y ago
> This would drive me nuts, as there's no easy way to predict what sort of transformations it would make. I believe that's what the Lexicons are for within the service.
- tyingq 10y ago
  If all of the auto transformations are defined Lexicons, that can be edited/removed, that would be fine. I read the post I was replying to as some sort of undefined, built-in, set of intelligent transformations. For example, 75F-> 75 Fahrenheit would require that you make a Lexicon entry for every value...1F, 2F, 3F, etc. That's not really intelligent :)