7 ms·
The 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 generat
by qeternity 9y ago
The 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.