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Comment by lofties | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to argue yours is not better. I preferred the AWS example, which was no doubt cherry picked, over all of your voices. Especially during the transition between sentences there is an audible glitch in the audio, whereas AWS transitioned smoothly.

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I'm gonna agree with you.

I get lots of weird random artifacts in Unreal. Sometimes it's a weird "vibrato" on some words, some words are unrealistically raspy. Plus it's a bit too sibilant in general compared to AWS. Clicking the "Redo" button fixes it but then other artifacts crop up in other places, which leads me to believe this is completely fixable.

And what do you mean by cherry-picked? I don't think the Amazon example is cherry picked, you can type your own custom text there! They're just using the AWS API themselves. Maybe I misunderstood you.

Anyway, it's a bit unfair because Amazon probably spent millions in their product, but I wouldn't exactly call it better...

Sure, that's why I put "arguably" as I honestly know that AWS is really good. But I did pick the best AWS voice which is the most popular one amongst many read aloud apps, though! Anyways, I'll try to implement speaker selection for AWS so that the comparison is more fair. I barely finished our multi-speaker feature before launching on PH.

You should probably edit the title - some amount of puffery is reasonable when showcasing one's own work but if you're so wide of the mark, the only feedback you'll get is about how your representations are inaccurate. Which is what's happening.

The title has been edited (I think by a yc moderator) which I think is a good move.

I think both are pretty good, but to my ears the UnrealSpeech ones all have very sharp, grating "s" sounds. The AWS voice is much smoother in this regard. Is this something that can be configured to a degree or would you have to post-process it with an de-esser? Because I can't imagine listing to those voices for anything longer than the example text.

Yup, trying to fix this

I like the character of the voices, especially Male B. Sounds a little like Brokaw, maybe.

But yeah sometimes I'd have to regenerate before I got non-glitchy audio. Still though, very cool.

Just copy-pasted a piece from the other HN tread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31630193) and it's not even close to AWS:

https://unrealspeech.com/k6g8a

Especially considering other languages, AWS is pretty good at both Spain and latin american Spanish.

The unreal guy sounds really nervous to me. Or like constipated or something. His random energy across sentences makes him seem uncomfortable.

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