Re:Reviving the 1973 Unix text to voice translator
by nmfisher on Sunday January 03, 2021 @08:11AM
(#25621569)
I use Azure neural TTS for (Chinese) voice synthesis in my app, and honestly it's amazing.
I did experiment with Google's API at the beginning, the audio would contain recurring artefacts that made it painfully obvious it wasn't real. If I had to describe it, I'd say "50ms of the sound your computer makes when it hangs while playing an audio file".
No such problems with Azure. Zero artefacts and nice, crisp, natural enunciation, though unfortunately it is still quite unreliable when synthesizing single words (as compared with full sentences). You can actually test it out by using the "Read Aloud" feature inside Edge.
I don't know how well this translates to English, though. I definitely enjoy the benefit of working with a gender/language combination (female/Chinese) that's received the largest total investment of effort and resources. Many well-resourced Chinese companies (banks, tech services, gaming, etc) all use similar synthesized female voices in their phone/online/B&M services.
I did experiment with Google's API at the beginning, the audio would contain recurring artefacts that made it painfully obvious it wasn't real. If I had to describe it, I'd say "50ms of the sound your computer makes when it hangs while playing an audio file".
No such problems with Azure. Zero artefacts and nice, crisp, natural enunciation, though unfortunately it is still quite unreliable when synthesizing single words (as compared with full sentences). You can actually test it out by using the "Read Aloud" feature inside Edge.
I don't know how well this translates to English, though. I definitely enjoy the benefit of working with a gender/language combination (female/Chinese) that's received the largest total investment of effort and resources. Many well-resourced Chinese companies (banks, tech services, gaming, etc) all use similar synthesized female voices in their phone/online/B&M services.