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Ask HN: Who makes the most advanced text-to-speech technology?
I want to convert some articles and books to audio so that I can listen to them while walking. I would like to try the current leader in commercially-available text-to-speech.
I have tried a few text-to-speech offerings, such as the ones included in Firefox and macOS, but they sound robotic to the point that they are difficult to listen to. The pacing is unnatural. I am hoping there is something available that is better.
- dbish 9y agoHave you tried AWS Polly? https://aws.amazon.com/polly/ https://aws.amazon.com/polly/
- GFischer 9y agoSeconded, AWS Polly should be good, there's also Bing Speech https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/speech/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service... Google WaveNet promises even better audio, but it's not available yet. In my experience, Amazon is "good enough". https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/ https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio...
- oftenwrong 9y agoI just gave it a go. It does a good job, but still the pacing and intonation are unnatural and difficult to follow. If this is the current state-of-the-art, or close to it, I would rather just read. It is possible I could train myself to listen to it. Hats off to the developers, though. I know human-like text-to-speech is difficult.
- eggie5 9y agoalthough, not a commercially available product, the SOTA for text-to-speach just came out this week and it's called TacoTron 2 https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/index.html https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/ind...
- 5mixer 9y agoThis might not be very helpful if you are looking for specific texts to be read, but it might be worth trying to find human spoken texts (audio books and so on). Even some medium articles have spoken copies, if I remember correctly.
- oftenwrong 9y agoI do use audio books, and audio versions of articles when available.