[HN Gopher] Show HN: Voicera - Add life-like AI voice dictation ...
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Show HN: Voicera - Add life-like AI voice dictation to your blogs
and articles
Author : arbobmehmood
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-08-29 14:10 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.voicera.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.voicera.co)
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I assume there are a number of Youtube channels doing something
| like this already - I occasionally notice that an otherwise well-
| researched and presented item has a non-English idiom - such that
| even a fluent speaker would self-correct.
|
| I guess the idea is to write one and just "release" it in many
| languages.
|
| The point of all that is, yeah, computer generated voice has
| gotten to the point I need dumb mistakes to realise ... one of
| those "the tech has passed an inflection point" moments
| phreeza wrote:
| I think I know the type of video you mean, I always assumed
| they were not TTS but professional speakers hired on Fiver and
| obliged to speak the text verbatim even though there are weird
| phrases.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| And yet apps that leverage this are quasi absent. The Firefox
| screen reader widget is good but the voices are limited and the
| functionality limited to well formatted pages. E-book software
| seems to not integrate this tech either.
| pvinis wrote:
| Cool idea, but wouldn't it be more useful as a feature for an RSS
| reader? No user of mine would come to the website and listen, but
| if they use a reader for my feed and other feeds, that would be
| useful for them.
| arbobmehmood wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. We'll look into it.
| sramam wrote:
| Congratulations on launching!
|
| A question - in the sample dictation on the site, it adds a voice
| annotation for "features" and "pricing categories". These weren't
| encoded in the HTML. How does it figure that?
| arbobmehmood wrote:
| It's manually generated from our in-house content. :)
| kkielhofner wrote:
| I submitted this comment on ProductHunt too but I wanted to make
| sure you see it:
|
| Looks great but FYI there's a long-standing healthcare company
| that's been in business for over a decade with various speech
| products/features named "Vocera"[0]. I'm not a lawyer but they
| have many trademarks on Vocera and the standard is generally
| "likely to cause confusion". You're probably well in that
| territory with a speech product that sounds almost identical and
| is one letter off. When Googling "voicera" Google
| replaces/suggests "Vocera". There's a pretty decent chance you'll
| be hearing from them.
|
| [0] https://www.vocera.com/
| chakspak wrote:
| I was thinking the same. I hear this company name all the time
| at my work, so when I saw the title, I did a double-take and
| thought there was a typo. They even have AI voice command, so I
| briefly thought it was the same company.
| jhghjlg wrote:
| You must be fun at parties.
| garduque wrote:
| We use the Vocera hands free devices where I work. At first
| glance of this title I thought "oh, they do AI dictation stuff,
| too? I guess that makes sense." And then I noticed the spelling
| and had the same thought as you. So, ditto.
| llimos wrote:
| Isn't this built-in in most browsers?
| adz_6891 wrote:
| Looks cool, congrats on the launch! Will you guys be doing text
| to speech in any indian languages? If so would love to see a demo
| of that!
| arbobmehmood wrote:
| Thanks for using our app. Voicera currently supports English
| (India) accent. However, more languages are definitely in the
| cards.
| spyder wrote:
| Wanted to try but I'm getting: "Invalid SSML request" and on
| other pages "Insufficient credits.", or just returns the sample
| voice.
| arbobmehmood wrote:
| Hello. Can you please send me your registered email ID on
| contact@voicera.co? We'll see what's the issue.
| psyc wrote:
| The word 'dictation' is confusing here. I think you want
| 'recitation', 'vocalization', 'narration' or just 'reading'.
| Dictation is speech-to-text, this is text-to-speech.
| phreeza wrote:
| Came to the comment section to say this. I suspect it may be a
| mistranslation?
| r_singh wrote:
| that's what the software does, it dictates the text...
| tirpen wrote:
| No, it does the exact opposite.
|
| Dictation is writing down what someone is saying.
|
| This is software that says what someone writes down.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| > Dictation is the transcription of spoken text: one person
| who is "dictating" speaks and another who is "taking
| dictation" writes down the words as they are spoken. Among
| speakers of several languages, dictation is used as a test
| of language skill, similar to spelling bees in the English-
| speaking world.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictation_(exercise)
|
| Here the software is the "person who is dictating".
| layer8 wrote:
| It's not dictation if the spoken text is not recorded or
| written down by a device (voice recorder) or by a human.
| [deleted]
| JZL003 wrote:
| Anyone have a nice opensource/pretrained TTS model they like
| using? I use google's wavenet TTS heavily to create 'audiobooks'
| (especially from archive.org which is great for old books). But
| it's pretty expensive
|
| I periodically look for new versions and, while the examples
| sound better, they fall down really hard on other text.
| briga wrote:
| Mozilla has a pretty good open-source TTS library. In general
| high-quality pre-trained TTS models are surprisingly hard to
| find--I'd also be curious to see if anyone knows any good
| alternatives
| synesthesiam wrote:
| You might give Larynx a try: https://github.com/rhasspy/larynx
|
| Demo: https://youtu.be/hBmhDf8cl0k
|
| (I'm the author)
| follower wrote:
| Wow.
|
| I'd really encourage you to invest some time into SEO and
| promotion of your project.
|
| I spent a bunch of time recently looking for exactly this:
| TTS, offline, an Open Source licence, and with
| "decent"/"natural" sounding default voices.
|
| The "best" I ended up finding was `espeak-ng` but, really,
| the "natural"-ness is barely comparable to what Larynx seems
| to produce--based on a quick listen to the demos here:
| https://rhasspy.github.io/larynx/#en-us
|
| On first impressions at least, Larynx definitely seems to be
| a project that desires a higher profile in this space.
|
| Thanks for sharing the project here, I'll be interested to
| take a deeper look when I circle back to my side-side project
| that could benefit from it. :)
|
| (BTW I didn't watch/listen to the YT video all the way
| through yet but if the narration is generated by Larynx
| (which it seemed it _might_ be?) it 's definitely worth
| stating that up front.)
|
| Oh, also, really appreciate that there's multiple options for
| non-male voices too which is something that seems to be
| sorely lacking in similar projects.
| infinite8s wrote:
| Yes agreed, this is great! The best I found that could
| generate faster than real-time without a GPU was
| speedyspeech (https://github.com/janvainer/speedyspeech).
| Unfortunately it was only trained using the LJSpeech
| dataset and I haven't been able to transfer to a multi-
| voice model. I have been using it to build an story-telling
| app for my kids.
| JZL003 wrote:
| That is pretty nice, one of the best collection of voices
| I've seen and the best interface
|
| Google gives 1 million characters per month free which I
| don't often go over, but this will be really useful for when
| I do
|
| I don't want to be unappreciative, it's amazing that this is
| possible much less free, but when you spend hours listening
| to it every day, the cracking and warbling do get old. I
| think there are better models I've heard snippets of but the
| truly amazing thing about google's is how robust it is to
| very weird words
|
| (When I tried all the public cloud offering's, IBM's was the
| marginally nicest AFAICT but it was the most expensive with
| least free quota)
| JZL003 wrote:
| Yeah https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/text-to-speech
| it's so smooth
| czottmann wrote:
| That is ace. Thanks for sharing!
| TylerLives wrote:
| I don't have an answer to your question but I'm curious about
| something else: What kind of results would you get if you used
| one of the paid TTS models to generate a dataset and then
| trained your model on that dataset? Would it be possible to
| recreate their model in this way?
| geraneum wrote:
| This might be beneficial for visually impaired if the performance
| (closer to natural voice) is better than the default text-to-
| speech softwares on the OS. I think this is an important factor.
|
| However OS makers can catch up and threaten the business model of
| this software by integrating a better TTS.
| wrs wrote:
| Listen to the bad reading of "Let users listen to your articles
| while they shop, commute or do something else". Having your text
| read by a dumb computer is yet another reason to use the Oxford
| comma.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| How does it compare to something like AWS Polly?
|
| I noticed AWS blogs all have this feature in recent times which
| is cool.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| It seems to be the exact same voice
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(page generated 2021-08-29 23:02 UTC)