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Comment by jscheel | Hacker News Reader

Go to the actual audio samples page to hear several interesting examples: https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/ind...

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I think I'd still pick out most of these as likely machine-generated. But it's getting very close. Some of Amazon's Polly voices (especially a couple of the English women) sound good to me as well. They're not quite at the point where I'd use them for applications where people expect human speech but it's not far away.

I use Polly for ebook to audiobook conversion and they work pretty well for most stuff - not completely natural by any means but more than sufficient for casual listening.

https://auditus.cc

I had no trouble picking out the pairs at the bottom of that site (whether they are generated or not is in the URL for the audio, so you can do a blind test fairly easily)

The last set of samples includes comparisons with the source human. The only one that I can guess with confidence is the last pair. (Sample 1 of the pair contains assumed-context emotional inflection.)

I find the machine-generated ones to be more rhythmic and to have intonations with more consistent rises and falls in tone. I guessed the last three correctly based on listening for this. The first one I guessed wrong but in that case I was trying to differentiate them based on other tells.

Agreed, Polly has some great voices as well.

Hearing the tongue twisters pronounced perfectly is a joy.

Looks like we found a new Turing test.

Wait until we train speech bots to fumble at tongue twisters

Uncanny valley

I wonder if it's more difficult to train something like this to stumble on tongue twisters in the same ways and places that a real person would.

Edit: Interesting, "Talib Kweli confirmed to AllHipHop that he will be releasing an album in the next year." actually sounds flawed to me. I hear "Al Hip Hop" instead of "All Hip Hop," though given my hearing problems, I could be wrong.

I dislike Google but damn if this isn’t impressive!

Maybe I start with the opposite prior, but this is absolutely mind blowing to me. The future truly looks much brighter now. If they couple this with their automatic translation (which will only get better), in a few short years you will be able to travel to an arbitrary country and use your smart phone to chat with people. Separately, I dream of the day when someone will release a personal language coach. I used one to improve my English, and I paid more than $xx per hour (a lot). Can you imagine paying $2.99 to get one with no time limits?

Consider checking out Italki.com

Personalized language teachers at extremely affordable rates. I've payed as low as $6/hr before.

I wonder how good the security/data-sanitation is. If you don’t know the language, you might think you’re saying “I will not buy this record, it is scratched.” but you end up with hovercraft eel removal services.

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