4 ms·

It's good that Bing, Bard are using the latest Microsoft, Google Cloud offerings but it would be nice to see these speech advances (along with audio palm - http

It's good that Bing, Bard are using the latest Microsoft, Google Cloud offerings but it would be nice to see these speech advances (along with audio palm - https://google-research.github.io/seanet/audiopalm/examples/ https://google-research.github.io/seanet/audiopalm/examples/ etc) hit public api's and/or user interfaces. Bard's TTS is alright but it's clearly behind. On that note, Bing's English/Korean TTS is really good. I also didn't realize Microsoft uses the best offerings for free TTS on edge so it blows google's default tts voices away.

ShamelessC 3y ago
> public api's and/or user interfaces sigh. Google used to release _some_ models. Guess the fun early days are coming to an end.
- Legend2440 3y ago
  Google is a business and this is clearly a valuable product.
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    Sure, but there was a time not too long ago when companies were still in the "good will" phase of handing out even highly valuable models like CLIP, guided-diffusion, etc. Come to think, it was mostly OpenAI doing this. And they kinda still do? But far more selectively. I'm just preemptively romanticizing that.
  - rasz 3y ago
    Product is something you sell to make money. The only real Google product is users sold to advertisers.
    - vore 3y ago
      Uh, what about all of their paid cloud offerings?
      - rasz 3y ago
        Distraction. Generated whole 1% of overall profit last quarter, and that was the first time it didnt lose money. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/25/googles-cloud-business-turns-profitable-for-the-first-time-on-record.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/25/googles-cloud-business-turns...
    - jsnell 3y ago
      Google's non-advertising revenue in the latest quarter was about $15 billion. Is that significant amount of non-ads product revenue? At least that is higher than the revenue of any of IBM, HP, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, Netflix, Broadcom, Qualcomm, or Salesforce in that same quarter. I think their non-ads businesses alone would be the 6th largest US tech company by revenue. (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, the ads business of Alphabet, Meta. Am I forgetting something?)
      - rasz 3y ago
        Revenue is easy when you lose money on every dollar. Last quarter Ads printed $21B of income, rest was a loss except cloud not losing hundreds of $millions for the very first time. https://abc.xyz/assets/investor/static/pdf/2023Q1_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf https://abc.xyz/assets/investor/static/pdf/2023Q1_alphabet_e...
  - joezydeco 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - vore 3y ago
      I don’t want to defend Google’s business practices, but this is such a trite comment someone always feels compelled to post on anything about Google, including even a research paper, apparently.
      - georgemcbay 3y ago
        I don't bother to post the comment, but the high likelihood of any Google project/product being killed within a year or two is absolutely the first thought I have whenever a new Google project/product is announced (not because of HN posts, but because of their history), so good job on that Google.
      - joezydeco 3y ago
        I'll argue it's not trite. It's a concise compilation of the thousands of teeth-gnashing comments here on HN and all over the internet whenever Google randomly drowns another one of its children. Just fucking stay away from Google products. Period.
        relativ575 3y ago
        First of all it isn't a product. It's a f*king research paper. Like dozens other showing up on HN every day. Most of them never becomes a product. Second of all, by whining nauseously you drown out discussions on the merits of the technology, and chase people away. I hardly read Google news on HN now precisely because of that reason. Imagine if "Attention is all your need" came out now? [0] Save your complaint for when Google makes it a product. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15938082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15938082
        serf 3y ago
        >Save your complaint for when Google makes it a product. or save yourself the trouble and find alternatives to big-G. It's entirely their own fault that people now view all Google news as temporary and fleeting. People don't want to put time into things that'll get thrown away in a year. Reading G research papers seems like a shortcut to me, know what will be thrown away in 2 years before it's a valid product in 1 year and someone gets huckleberry'd into devoting time and effort into implementing the dead-product-walking API.
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  Ha i'm not even asking for code/model releases. It's just a bit funny that what you can *pay* google to use is so far behind what they have up and running collecting dust.
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    Also true.
  - Raed667 3y ago
    I'm speculating here, but for me it looks like the product (R&D) teams are not working closely with the research teams. Even the demo website is on Github Pages instead of a Google domain/blog.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  How in gods name is this a controversial take? Good lord.
refulgentis 3y ago
> I also didn't realize Microsoft uses the best offerings for free TTS on edge so it blows google's default tts voices away. This sounds really interesting - can you share a bit more? I'm behind in this space, my parser got all jammed up, something like: "Microsoft uses [the best offerings for free TTS](as in FOSS libraries, or free as in beer SaaS?) [on edge](Edge browser, or on the edge as in client's computer?)(Is the implication that all TTS on the client's computer blows Google's default TTS voices away?)"
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  The top voices you'd pay for on Azure's TTS services can be used for free to read web page(and PDF) text on Microsoft Edge. I don't mean Open source. This is not the case with Google
  - wg0 3y ago
    I didn't know that. Edge is too good. Just downloaded and such features are great.
- GranPC 3y ago
  I believe they mean that the free TTS feature in Microsoft Edge uses their best technology, and that said tech is better than Google's default offering.
GordonS 3y ago
I used Azure TTS for a product demo voice-over recently, and nobody I showed it to knew it wasn't a human doing it! Some of Azure's voices are better than others, and the TTS web app has a few minor bugs, but overall I was really pleased with the whole experience.
jameszhao00 3y ago
Have you tried Google Cloud Studio voices? https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/wavenet#studio_voices_preview https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/wavenet#studio_...
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  Yes. I'm not saying Google's Top Cloud offerings are bad although i still think microsoft's stuff is better. Just that 1. It's behind their current sota research 2. You can only use those voices extensively by paying for it. Microsoft offers their best stuff on edge for free. So for reading aloud a pdf or web page, microsoft is far better.
  - jameszhao00 3y ago
    By “SOTA” tts I think you mean LLM based TTS? With sound and language tokens trained GPT style? Without going into too much details, imo they’re not really usable right now for TTS use cases.
    - famouswaffles 3y ago
      Not necessarily LLM style. The above isn't for instance. also Google Studio Voices is excellent. Definitely better than Microsoft's best, albeit very limited voices.
  - skybrian 3y ago
    It's disappointing, but I wouldn't expect research algorithms to be available immediately unless they held it back until the product is ready. I guess Apple would do that?

ShamelessC 3y ago

> public api's and/or user interfaces sigh. Google used to release _some_ models. Guess the fun early days are coming to an end.

Legend2440 3y ago
Google is a business and this is clearly a valuable product.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Sure, but there was a time not too long ago when companies were still in the "good will" phase of handing out even highly valuable models like CLIP, guided-diffusion, etc. Come to think, it was mostly OpenAI doing this. And they kinda still do? But far more selectively. I'm just preemptively romanticizing that.
- rasz 3y ago
  Product is something you sell to make money. The only real Google product is users sold to advertisers.
  - vore 3y ago
    Uh, what about all of their paid cloud offerings?
    - rasz 3y ago
      Distraction. Generated whole 1% of overall profit last quarter, and that was the first time it didnt lose money. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/25/googles-cloud-business-turns-profitable-for-the-first-time-on-record.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/25/googles-cloud-business-turns...
  - jsnell 3y ago
    Google's non-advertising revenue in the latest quarter was about $15 billion. Is that significant amount of non-ads product revenue? At least that is higher than the revenue of any of IBM, HP, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, Netflix, Broadcom, Qualcomm, or Salesforce in that same quarter. I think their non-ads businesses alone would be the 6th largest US tech company by revenue. (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, the ads business of Alphabet, Meta. Am I forgetting something?)
    - rasz 3y ago
      Revenue is easy when you lose money on every dollar. Last quarter Ads printed $21B of income, rest was a loss except cloud not losing hundreds of $millions for the very first time. https://abc.xyz/assets/investor/static/pdf/2023Q1_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf https://abc.xyz/assets/investor/static/pdf/2023Q1_alphabet_e...
- joezydeco 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - vore 3y ago
    I don’t want to defend Google’s business practices, but this is such a trite comment someone always feels compelled to post on anything about Google, including even a research paper, apparently.
    - georgemcbay 3y ago
      I don't bother to post the comment, but the high likelihood of any Google project/product being killed within a year or two is absolutely the first thought I have whenever a new Google project/product is announced (not because of HN posts, but because of their history), so good job on that Google.
    - joezydeco 3y ago
      I'll argue it's not trite. It's a concise compilation of the thousands of teeth-gnashing comments here on HN and all over the internet whenever Google randomly drowns another one of its children. Just fucking stay away from Google products. Period.
      - relativ575 3y ago
        First of all it isn't a product. It's a f*king research paper. Like dozens other showing up on HN every day. Most of them never becomes a product. Second of all, by whining nauseously you drown out discussions on the merits of the technology, and chase people away. I hardly read Google news on HN now precisely because of that reason. Imagine if "Attention is all your need" came out now? [0] Save your complaint for when Google makes it a product. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15938082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15938082
        serf 3y ago
        >Save your complaint for when Google makes it a product. or save yourself the trouble and find alternatives to big-G. It's entirely their own fault that people now view all Google news as temporary and fleeting. People don't want to put time into things that'll get thrown away in a year. Reading G research papers seems like a shortcut to me, know what will be thrown away in 2 years before it's a valid product in 1 year and someone gets huckleberry'd into devoting time and effort into implementing the dead-product-walking API.
famouswaffles 3y ago
Ha i'm not even asking for code/model releases. It's just a bit funny that what you can *pay* google to use is so far behind what they have up and running collecting dust.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Also true.
- Raed667 3y ago
  I'm speculating here, but for me it looks like the product (R&D) teams are not working closely with the research teams. Even the demo website is on Github Pages instead of a Google domain/blog.
ShamelessC 3y ago
How in gods name is this a controversial take? Good lord.

refulgentis 3y ago

> I also didn't realize Microsoft uses the best offerings for free TTS on edge so it blows google's default tts voices away. This sounds really interesting - can you share a bit more? I'm behind in this space, my parser got all jammed up, something like: "Microsoft uses [the best offerings for free TTS](as in FOSS libraries, or free as in beer SaaS?) [on edge](Edge browser, or on the edge as in client's computer?)(Is the implication that all TTS on the client's computer blows Google's default TTS voices away?)"

famouswaffles 3y ago
The top voices you'd pay for on Azure's TTS services can be used for free to read web page(and PDF) text on Microsoft Edge. I don't mean Open source. This is not the case with Google
- wg0 3y ago
  I didn't know that. Edge is too good. Just downloaded and such features are great.
GranPC 3y ago
I believe they mean that the free TTS feature in Microsoft Edge uses their best technology, and that said tech is better than Google's default offering.

GordonS 3y ago

I used Azure TTS for a product demo voice-over recently, and nobody I showed it to knew it wasn't a human doing it! Some of Azure's voices are better than others, and the TTS web app has a few minor bugs, but overall I was really pleased with the whole experience.

jameszhao00 3y ago

Have you tried Google Cloud Studio voices? https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/wavenet#studio_voices_preview https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/wavenet#studio_...

famouswaffles 3y ago
Yes. I'm not saying Google's Top Cloud offerings are bad although i still think microsoft's stuff is better. Just that 1. It's behind their current sota research 2. You can only use those voices extensively by paying for it. Microsoft offers their best stuff on edge for free. So for reading aloud a pdf or web page, microsoft is far better.
- jameszhao00 3y ago
  By “SOTA” tts I think you mean LLM based TTS? With sound and language tokens trained GPT style? Without going into too much details, imo they’re not really usable right now for TTS use cases.
  - famouswaffles 3y ago
    Not necessarily LLM style. The above isn't for instance. also Google Studio Voices is excellent. Definitely better than Microsoft's best, albeit very limited voices.
- skybrian 3y ago
  It's disappointing, but I wouldn't expect research algorithms to be available immediately unless they held it back until the product is ready. I guess Apple would do that?