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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Could we drop “Lifelike” from the title? It's marketing puffery (and untrue, it sounded very robotic to me to the point I was convinced I'd heard the wrong audio file). The actual story is that it's Amazon's text-to-speech-as-a-service offering, not that it's particularly innovative in terms of sounding good.

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The male english sample sounds like dragon speech from 10+ years ago, and the female sounded more robotic than others I've heard...

I don't see (or hear?) the advance here...

i thought you guys were being either hyperbolic or overly critical. then i heard the demo files.

98 upvotes? Huh?

How can you tell?

i don't get the response- my comment does not have 98 votes- thought it was some reference i didn't get, or something.

Probably the submission had 98 up-votes at the time the comment was made, not your particular comment.

Oh... oh ok... yeah that makes more sense. i get it now. Super derp moment.

I agree that the voice sounds pretty bad, but I think the 'lifelike' part comes from the intelligence part. I.E WA -> Washington, and 75F -> 75 Fahrenheit

Text-to-speech systems have been expanding abbreviations for decades, and it always backfires in some cases. For example, DECtalk would expand "Sun" to "Sunday" regardless of context, with the humorous result that blind people reading tech news in the 90s would often hear about Sunday Microsystems.

Edit: Yes, that example was unfair, because it's from the 90s (and actually, DECtalk was largely unchanged since the 80s, until it was ruined in the late 90s). Here's a somewhat more recent one: With the ETI-Eloquence engine, which was last updated in 2002, the string "2 Marketing" (which one might find, say, in a Wikipedia table of contents) is expanded to "March twond keting".

Hence the need for intelligence

Which it fails miserably at. They probably picked the one example that worked.

Someone linked another example here:

https://soundcloud.com/zack-bloom/amazons-new-text-to-speech...

And it pronounces 1970s (the decade) as one-thousand-nine-hundred-seven-ths.

You're not wrong, but that's still the best real-time TTS sample I've ever heard.

One blind guy I know opined in the late 90s that it's better to let the brain do the interpreting. But I understand that expansion of abbreviations makes TTS more attractive for mainstream applications.

I was looking around for samples, and this is the only sample I have heard so far. I think that sounds pretty good. The emotional tone is off, but it is a lot better than say, Siri (which I understand was designed to sound robotic to highlight the tech). But I'm also the guy who has had my MBP announce the hour and it has freaked out coworkers.

I don't know if this is crossing into uncanny valley territory. I think some of this is not being used to it.

Google Map's driving voice sounds subtly better than that voice sample. I'm looking forward to seeing if a similar service is coming for GCP.

I know a guy who's abbreviated middle name consistently gets pronounced as "street"

> the 'lifelike' part comes from the intelligence part. I.E WA -> Washington, and 75F -> 75 Fahrenheit

This would drive me nuts, as there's no easy way to predict what sort of transformations it would make. Basically, if it's not near perfect, it's arguably worse than no intelligence at all.

With our PBX stuff, I know it's dumb, so I'm already accustomed to giving it something I know it will read correctly, like "domain dot com".

> This would drive me nuts, as there's no easy way to predict what sort of transformations it would make.

I believe that's what the Lexicons are for within the service.

If all of the auto transformations are defined Lexicons, that can be edited/removed, that would be fine.

I read the post I was replying to as some sort of undefined, built-in, set of intelligent transformations.

For example, 75F-> 75 Fahrenheit would require that you make a Lexicon entry for every value...1F, 2F, 3F, etc. That's not really intelligent :)

It's more like the opposite of being innovative (unimaginative?)... They bring a product that could previously achieve that locally to a remote server and the quality is not any better.... and they want to charge you by the character... no thanks Amazon... hopefully it's free with Prime.

So I take it that this isn't Amazon's version of Adobe's VoCo or DeepMind's WaveNet.

Joel sounds like Microsoft Sam cleaned his blocked nose. shudders

Sooo cynical. This is way better than most TTS systems, including Google's. The only one I've ever heard that is better is DeepWave, and that suffers from lots of background noise.

Do you mean WaveNet? The noisiness is because it uses 8bit (mu-law) audio. 8bit is because WaveNet is computationally extremely expensive. It's pretty much proof of concept at this stage, not production ready TTS.

There is a faster variant on GitHub, called, of course, Faster-WaveNet.

Seriously? Compare Polly's English samples (particularly #2) in the original article with the Google's WaveNet samples:

Polly 1: https://d0.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/Polly/HelloEnglis...

Polly 2: https://d0.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/Polly/HelloEnglis...

WaveNet 1: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/pixie/us-engli...

WaveNet 2: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/pixie/us-engli...

There just isn't a comparison -- Polly sounds way more robotic.

Err you are agreeing with me. I meant WaveNet not DeepWave (sorry forgot the name).

I don't see how I'm agreeing with you when you said "This is way better than most TTS systems, including Google's."

WaveNet is Google's, and I'm saying that this is significantly worse.

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