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Google Cloud Text-To-Speech Powered by DeepMind WaveNet Technology
- qeternity 9y agoThe average English word is 4.5 characters and the average English speaker speaks 110-150 words per minute. This means that at $16/1m characters, we can generate speech at a cost between $28.57-39/hr. Per Google's post, WaveNet now costs 50ms of TPU time per 1s of speech generated, meaning, at 100% utilization, a TPU can generate somewhere between $571.40-780/hr. Google's TPUs can be deployed (by third parties) at $6.50/hr. That's some sweet sweet margin.
- vgt 9y agoNice analysis! That's the rub with doing tco analysis. How much value do you put on higher order of manageability? You should also include a workload volatility component to be entirely fair. Your analysis assumes it's entirely steady state. (Work at g)
- teraflop 9y agoI think your math is wrong by a factor of 60. Under your assumptions, one hour of speech is equivalent to 30-40 thousand characters, costing between $0.48-$0.65. That translates to revenue of $9.50-$12.96/hour per TPU.
- bufferoverflow 9y agoI double checked, you are correct: 16 * (4.5 * 110 * 60) / 1M = $0.475/hr 16 * (4.5 * 150 * 60) / 1M = $0.648/hr If you multiply by the number of 50ms in one second (20), you do get $9.5 - $12.96
- qeternity 9y agoThis is correct. Appols!
- qeternity 9y agoYou're right, I decided to switch from seconds as base unit to hours as base unit half way through writing the comment, and screwed up the conversion. I was accounting for seconds when I was already in minutes.
- z3t4 9y ago"the cloud" is just a better DRM.
- oh-kumudo 9y agoHow so? They don't sell the model itself, they sell the 'tickets' to allow you to take a picture of it. That is not DRM.
- ggg9990 9y agoYes, that’s what the OP is saying. Consumers fought against DRM so the business model became “never give them the software and you’ll never need to force DRM on them.”
- ucaetano 9y agoExcept that no companies actually wanted the software in the first place, they wanted the service. [Edited: made it clear I was talking about companies]
- ggg9990 9y agoMaybe you did, but I’d much rather have things like the Nest camera or text-to-speech as my own software. However, it’s impossible to get the same quality for the same amount spent this way, since vendors prefer the service business model.
- ucaetano 9y agoEdited, made it clear I was talking about companies. But for most consumers, the same applies. Most people don't want to own records, or even own music. They want to listen to music. They don't want to own cars, they want to get to places. > However, it’s impossible to get the same quality for the same amount spent this way, since vendors prefer the service business model. Not just a matter of preference, but economies of scale. Most consumers don't want to install and run their own local CCTV service, so the market left for those who want is too small to achieve the same economies of scale as the service market.
- paulgb 9y agoFree SAAS business model: transform text by translating each word to its shortest homonym, and take a cut of the cost savings :)
- froindt 9y agoGoogle does a remarkably good job with pronunciation. I'm consistently impressed by it. I was messing around with the ancient VBA text to speech system. If most TTS systems sucked as much as that one, you could also make a SAAS business for finding "typos" that make the word sound correct when pronounced.
- tristanj 9y agoAre there any voice samples?
- joefourier 9y agoYou can try it yourself here, just make sure to select English (United States) and Voicetype: Wavenet, as the other languages are not yet using the Wavenet system: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/ https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/
- dharma1 9y agoTry changing the pitch by more than +-10 as well, it breaks up quite amusingly
- alonmower 9y agoIt is fun to mismatch voices/languages to hear some hilariously stereotypical accents
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoIf you switch between "Basic" and the "Wavenet" you can hear the difference noted in this announcement, it is noticeably much better.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bufferoverflow 9y agoI wish they had some beautiful voices, not some of the most generic-sounding men and women.
- forgot-my-pw 9y agoLike Scarlett Johansson's? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n5muEWaE_Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n5muEWaE_Q
- aantix 9y agoWe need a virtual Barry White.
- jonknee 9y agoThey're working on it! Check out the samples here: https://research.googleblog.com/2018/03/expressive-speech-synthesis-with.html https://research.googleblog.com/2018/03/expressive-speech-sy... The last set is specifically interesting for your wish.
- gene1974 9y agoMeryl Streep should be worried right about now! (I heard that last set of renders... whoa!)
- gene1974 9y agoThis is MY VOICE as rendered by lyrebird.ai - https://lyrebird.ai/g/hFj87pbl https://lyrebird.ai/g/hFj87pbl - So, tech is out there trying to replicate the actual CHARACTER of individual human voices.
- StavrosK 9y agoIs there any API for generating speech that sounds like Google Now's assistant? The quality of that is much, much better than this new service.
- panarky 9y agoYes, I use this: https://github.com/pndurette/gTTS https://github.com/pndurette/gTTS Very simple and has the Google Assistant voice.
- StavrosK 9y agoHmm, that seems much worse than Google Assistant as well. I think my mistake was that I had selected "Basic" instead of "WaveNet" for the voices (because it's only available for US English). WaveNet is much better.
- slaymaker1907 9y agoFor any Google devs lurking out there, it doesn't seem to work at all in Firefox on Windows. It looks like it has something to do with custom web components with the following message: ReferenceError: customElements is not defined Also apparently some assertion errors with webcomponents (minified so line numbers not useful).
- pietroglyph 9y agoThat's probably because custom elements aren't supported in Firefox yet, unless you set "dom.webcomponents.enabled" and "dom.webcomponents.customelements.enable" to true. It's supposed to be fully enabled in Firefox 60/61 according to MDN [0]. [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/Using_custom_elements https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/...
- the8472 9y agoBest viewed with Chrome Explorer™ 5.0, Optimized for 1024x786 truecolor screens.
- ehsankia 9y agoSure, but should they not be either using polyfills, or not use code that is only supported by one browser? I understand how a project like Allo Web would want to use latest streaming api tech, but a documentation/product launch page doesn't need crazy new web tech.
- aviv 9y agoI have not seen any mention on licensing and whether you can cache and replay voice responses. Amazon Polly specifically allows caching.
- joelthelion 9y agoI for one welcome our new wavenet telemarketing overlords...
- dakna 9y agoI set the text to "I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." to be prepared for whats coming ...
- ImJasonH 9y agoQuick, someone remake Translation Party using Speech-to-Text-to-Speech-to-Text-to-Speech-ad-infinitum https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/quickstart https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/quickstart https://cloud.google.com/speech/docs/sync-recognize https://cloud.google.com/speech/docs/sync-recognize
- ImJasonH 9y agoNever say I never gave you anything, HN: https://gist.github.com/ImJasonH/78c22b36944b8ec189456e67e63bfaa4 https://gist.github.com/ImJasonH/78c22b36944b8ec189456e67e63...
- coryfklein 9y agoGoogle also announced today their Tacotron engine which features new prosody modeling speech generation. It allows them to generate speech that mimics personal intonation, accents, and rhythm, effectively mimicking an individuals "expression" in their speech. HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16691197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16691197
- vosper 9y agoI find it amusing that here we have all the corporatey buzzwords - "DeepMind WaveNet Technology" - but the other thing is called Tacotron.
- gcb0 9y agoif they named themselves DeepMind WaveNet Blockchain, they could have acquired Googlebet* by now. * that's how i call google/alphabet when it doesn't matter which side of the tax-avoiding entity i am referring to.
- VVyattPrentice 9y agogoophabet?
- jjeaff 9y agoThey also announced their new fluerosinth-ai amplitudinal speech to text deep-cloudmind product, although I can't find a reference link...
- ollin 9y agoDoes anyone have a GitHub project for epub -> mp3 using this service yet (for automatic audiobook generation)? May make it myself if I have time but curious if anyone already has set it up. EDIT: this is almost exactly their sample application (https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/python-docs-samples/tree/master/texttospeech/cloud-client https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/python-docs-samples/t...). Was able to get it working with epubs using pypandoc within the hour. Now just need to make it upload to Overcast... EDIT 2: Can now convert epubs directly to mp3s on Overcast. Yay!
- technics256 9y agoIs your code on github?
- ollin 9y agothe code was hacked together during a lecture so it's not very clean or robust, but here's the gist if you're trying to build something similar: https://gist.github.com/madebyollin/508930c86fa12e1a70e32d91411485a8 https://gist.github.com/madebyollin/508930c86fa12e1a70e32d91... (overcast uploading not shown–that's a separate script using mechanize)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Immortalin 9y agoShameless plug: https://auditus.cc https://auditus.cc Uses Amazon Polly
- tambourine_man 9y agoThe US English synthesized version is truly remarkable. Borderline scarily good. The fact that the preview only seems to work on Chrome (and silently breaks everywhere else) is not cool, thought.
- xiphias 9y agoIt was funny that I just found your typo after using text-to-speech on your comment :)
- verelo 9y agoIs it just me, or would a demo really make this posting much more interesting? Edit: There is one, on the actual Google Cloud Text-To-Speech page, so a few clicks in and you'll get one.
- mintplant 9y agoDoesn't show up on Firefox or Edge. Only a blank space where I assume the demo should be. Console suggests some sort of Polymer/WebComponents error.
- daoudc 9y agoI had an idea this morning for a personalised "podcast" that could read out e.g. the weather in your area, any new and important emails, the headlines and first paragraph of top stories from your favourite sources and notifications from social media. I think this is the missing thing that was needed to make this viable.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> I had an idea this morning for a personalised "podcast" that could read out e.g. the weather in your area, any new and important emails, the headlines and first paragraph of top stories from your favourite sources and notifications from social media. Google Assistant already has all the pieces of that (maybe not all the social media connections one might want, I haven't looked much at that), and the ability to string them together.
- nl 9y agoTry this: Hey Google, Tell me about my Day. and Hey Google, Tell me the news. There's a way you can get the news added to your daily briefing (the first trigger), but I can't remember how now.
- Jakob 9y agoHaving an English text but setting the language to another one like German or French is hilarious. You get e.g. ze Dscherman aczent or de frensch onehe.
- davidklemke 9y agoI am ashamed to admit I spent far too much time doing exactly that. The Japanese one really cracked me up.
- jfno67 9y agoI decided to do the opposite so French text with the wavenet English voice, pretty funny too.
- pacaro 9y agoAlso feeding it text from the Anguish Languish[1] corpus is pretty good. [1] https://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/anguish.html https://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/anguish.html
- neom 9y agoAs someone who struggles greatly with the written words, I'm so thankful to see this. For the last year or so I've poked around every few months to see if they'd opened this up more generally. I'd be more than happy to pay $30-60/mth (more if it had Spritz) for the ability to have high quality, high speech speed, text to speech for my emails, documents and news articles I'd like to consume.
- coryfklein 9y agoThe demo is available at https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/ https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/ Requires Chrome.
- benjismith 9y agoInteresting! I'd love to see a thorough comparison with the Amazon Polly service... https://aws.amazon.com/polly/ https://aws.amazon.com/polly/ Polly is priced at $4 per million characters and the Google WaveNet voices are $16 (compared with the Google non-WaveNet voices, which are also $4). After listening to a few samples from each service, the voice quality and prosody modeling seem roughly on par between Polly and WaveNet, or at least the differences I heard didn't seem to justify a 4x price multiplier. But I'd love to hear an informed opinion from someone with more expertise...
- jakozaur 9y agoA lot of voice generation is cost-center (call center that are outsourced to cheapest location) with short sentences. I doubt industry would pay 4x price multiplier for that use-case. So in fact WaveNet competes more with voiceover and new use-cases such as voice assistants. Still I don't hear that much difference there today, but maybe WaveNet will improve in the future to human level sooner than the other models.
- bufferoverflow 9y agoTo me Polly is way behind WaveNet when it comes to realism. Polly is robotic, WN is fluid.
- WheelsAtLarge 9y agoIt's very good. The voices reminds me of speech from real life people with accents. It's good enough for voice overs where previously real-life voices would be too expensive. I would say that it's better than Amazon's Polly when it's used to read long passages of text.
- ghaff 9y agoI don't know. They're good but they still sound robotic. For me, they work for applications where I sort of expect/accept that I'll get computer-generated speech anyway. But I wouldn't use them as a general substitute for a human speaking, even someone like me who doesn't exactly have a radio voice.
- remir 9y agoIt's getting more and more human sounding. Take a look at this research (also from Google): https://research.googleblog.com/2018/03/expressive-speech-synthesis-with.html https://research.googleblog.com/2018/03/expressive-speech-sy...
- ghaff 9y agoIt absolutely is. But I'm looking at it from a perspective of whether I could put a daily or weekly podcast out there using one of these TTS services and I come out with a resounding no (today).
- StavrosK 9y agoHere's a simple Python script that will fetch some sample audio using the request on the demo page and save it in a file: https://www.pastery.net/nujfhw/ https://www.pastery.net/nujfhw/ I have no idea what the rate limits are, so please don't abuse it, I wrote it because the demo didn't work in Firefox and I wanted to play around with it more extensively.
- mxuribe 9y agoThanks, pretty neat script; works nicely!
- PostOnce 9y agoAm I wrong in thinking that the cost of generating (realistic-sounding, learned-model) speech on commodity hardware will be near-zero soon, largely negating the value of a SaaS? I've been waiting a long time for decent sounding open source TTS software for narrating books to me, and now with deep learning it's either here or very near here, and the hardware is going to keep getting more performant at the same price. I guess that will be very appealing to businesses relying on TTS (e.g. call centers and phone robots and mobile apps with TTS, etc)
- wslh 9y agoSome companies don't ever think in hiring people to build and maintain it, they prefer to pay a subscription like Google Cloud.
- ariwilson 9y agoWhat open source TTS is as good as Google Cloud?
- PostOnce 9y agocheck the "kate" samples: https://github.com/Kyubyong/speaker_adapted_tts https://github.com/Kyubyong/speaker_adapted_tts This is with 1 minute of audio and 10 minutes of training, which is crazy to me. Maybe it's not "as good", but it's very good, and free, and it will get better, faster, and cheaper quickly?
- ghaff 9y agoPartially off-topic, but one of the things I find as a native English-speaking American is that British female accents (probably more specifically accents that are close to a "BBC accent") sound better to me. That's definitely true with Polly. I don't know if it's because flaws aren't quite as obvious to me or just that I like the accent better in general so I'm more willing to overlook them.
- paulryanrogers 9y ago"... the hardware is going to keep getting more performant at the same price" That is the hope but there are no guarantees. Perhaps specialized hardware can pick up where Moore's Law has tapered off.
- remir 9y agoImagine teaching these voices to sing. Something like DeepMind WaveNet Song Generator. You upload your music to the cloud, set some parameters (genre, tempo, emotion, etc) and a bunch of lyrics and the thing will spit out awesome vocals for you.
- severine 9y agoThat's a billion dollar idea, I wonder who'll do it, maybe you!
- ryeguy_24 9y agoBased on the pricing of $16 per 1 million characters (roughly equal to a 400-500 page book), doesn't this severely threaten the voiceover market place? I just priced the cost of a human voiceover on VoiceBunny.com for a 400-page book and I got an average turnaround time of 90 days / $15K cost vs WaveNet's $16 cost and only 30 mins of computational time. That sounds like an interesting disruptor to me.
- brad0 9y agoIt does if people are willing to listen to the voice for 10 hours+. I could listen to this voice for a while, but the voice needs more emotion in it before it could be actually useful for long text.
- dhon_ 9y agoTacotron (also by Google) looks promising in this area https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/global_style_tokens/index.html https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/global_style_...
- kokimame 9y agoI'm using Amazon Polly for a few of months to make videos for language learners. And I realize English voices powered by WaveNet slightly better than those of Amazon but the default Japanese sounds way too worse. Anyway, their pricing and platform are almost same with Amazon, so I definitely need to add another interface for this TTS into my app. You can listen to Amazon Polly voices with the video I made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysMp0k4oR5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysMp0k4oR5c
- tmalsburg2 9y agoThis is great, but there remain very difficult problems to be solved. The prosody generated by this is fairly generic and not informed by a true understanding of the text. Consider this sentence: I have plans to leave. If you stress the word "plans", the sentence means that the speaker is not necessarily intending to actually leave. However, when the stress is on "leave", the speaker definitely intends to leave. A human reader can easily infer the correct meaning from context but text-to-speech systems can't because they don't have any systematic understanding of the things being talked about and the social pragmatics of the discourse. As long as these issues aren't solved, text-to-speech systems will make mistakes. These mistakes will be easy to spot in some cases but can also have catastrophic consequences in other cases: "I have plans to bomb North Korea."
- londons_explore 9y agoGoogle has solved that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16692559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16692559
- tmalsburg2 9y agoThis is really cool, thanks for the link, but it solves a different problem.
- lysp 9y agoI picked 3 random paragraphs from a random article on a local online news site. The voices did sound quite natural and "news-readery", however the one issue I did find is adding a pause between words. With the example phrase: "He bought himself a boat and then took it to his house". You often expect a small pause after the word "boat". I was able to manually fix it by adding some commas and full stops, however the AI was not able to pick up those pauses naturally. It sounded like someone was rushing through the speech instead of stopping occasionally to "take a breath".