4 ms·
While the 100x speedup sounds impressive, a raw speed number without details regarding hardware is pretty meaningless. I'm guessing they got the 20x realtime sp
by svantana 9y ago
While the 100x speedup sounds impressive, a raw speed number without details regarding hardware is pretty meaningless. I'm guessing they got the 20x realtime speed from running it on their new TPU hardware, which they say can do 180 Tflops. That means you would need 9 Tflops of computing power to run this in realtime -- still pretty far away from running on a phone, or PC for that matter.
- chmod775 9y agoThey literally said it's launching in the Google Assistant (i.e. running on phones) now. In fact that's the title of the article.
- kowdermeister 9y agoHe also missed the speedup by a factor of 10, it's 1000x faster now :) I doubt it's just more hardware, they must have optimized the networks seriously.
- svantana 9y agoOf course they did, I was merely challenging the implied message that it is now 'fast enough', that the speed problem is solved.
- wmf 9y agoDoes TTS run on the phone or the cloud?
- trevorstrohman 9y agoIt runs in the cloud.
- chmod775 9y agoIt runs on the phone afaik, while speech recognition on the other hand is supported by stuff Google runs in the cloud. Edit: I might be wrong, at the end of a paragraph they say it runs on Google’s TPU cloud infrastructure, though it isn't clear to me whether they just use that for training. Edit 2: I just tried it on my phone. At least stuff like asking it to "Turn on WiFi" works without an internet connection, and yields a TTS response.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- spuz 9y ago> I just tried it on my phone. At least stuff like asking it to "Turn on WiFi" works without an internet connection, and yields a TTS response. But this is the status quo. You would not expect Google to disable offline TTS just for slightly improved quality. The real question is, is it running Wavenet offline or the previous version of its TTS engine offline?
- trevorstrohman 9y agoToday's announcement is cloud-only. We also support an older algorithm for offline use that's less computationally intensive.
- modeless 9y agoIs the offline one improving also? Google Maps often falls back to it (much more often than necessary for some reason) and it sounds completely different and far worse.
- puzzle 9y agoGoogle TTS supports both. Maps prefers the cloud one so that you're not at the mercy of whatever TTS your manufacturer has installed (Samsung uses their own, right?), but will fall back to the local one it there's no connectivity. I can't remember if the Google TTS implements that or if it's custom to Maps.