Re:Startups that launched today at Y Combinator’s W18 Demo Day
by bambax on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @06:44AM
(#16636880)
Reading your comment I just tried and also got 100%. There are more micro-pitch variations, vibrato and harmonics in the human voice; the robot voice kind of sounds the same, but on some short sounds sometimes produces a kind of monocord sound that is not only non-human, but probably impossible for a human to imitate.
It seems some people are more sensitive than others to robot-sounding or robot-looking. I have a very hard time watching modern movies because most special effects completely ruin the experience for me; but other people seem to not mind at all.
I think Voicery does itself a disservice by featuring a "pick the human voice versus pick our machine voice" demo quiz on their website. I got 100%, and it led me to emotionally response "they have failed", but in fact the voice sounded great.
A more useful demo would have been to hear a range of different voices and be able to put my own text in and hear it read back.
But it is not the point that a machine voice can be determined versus a human voice. The important question is "does the machine voice sound good enough".
Instead, their marketing approach has forced me to make a comparison in which my conclusion was that they tech "lost" in some sort of contest.