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Am 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

Am 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 ago
Some companies don't ever think in hiring people to build and maintain it, they prefer to pay a subscription like Google Cloud.
ariwilson 9y ago
What open source TTS is as good as Google Cloud?
- PostOnce 9y ago
  check 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 ago
    Partially 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.
- PostOnce 9y ago
  I don't mean general purpose hardware, I mean specifically neural hardware, whether that means GPUs (as we know them), GPUs with special hardware like the "tensor cores", TPUs, "neuromorphic chips" whatever that is, FPGAs becoming part of average computers, or something else. There's no end in sight to the improvement of neural hardware, not like the wall x86 CPUs have hit anyway.

wslh 9y ago

Some companies don't ever think in hiring people to build and maintain it, they prefer to pay a subscription like Google Cloud.

ariwilson 9y ago

What open source TTS is as good as Google Cloud?

PostOnce 9y ago
check 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 ago
  Partially 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.

PostOnce 9y ago
I don't mean general purpose hardware, I mean specifically neural hardware, whether that means GPUs (as we know them), GPUs with special hardware like the "tensor cores", TPUs, "neuromorphic chips" whatever that is, FPGAs becoming part of average computers, or something else. There's no end in sight to the improvement of neural hardware, not like the wall x86 CPUs have hit anyway.