Hacker News Reader

Comment by dj_mc_merlin | Hacker News Reader

The examples are insanely good. Insanely good. I can barely believe we really live in a world where this is possible. I don't have anything constructive to add.. just wow.

View on HN

I work in TTS and i just dont believe this. If these really are random text and not trained on literally the copy they are reading, with no correction I would be surprised. Also, our competitors have good voices but they also take ages to produce. Maybe these really are legit but take like 1 minute to produce or something. So while this is impressive, i doubt that in practice this would be this high quality and could even approach real time

I want to agree, but I searched on their website and found their narration service with 2 full book examples. I listened to the first one for a while and it's the first time an Ai narrator was good enough to keep me listening: https://www.audiostory.ai/2065785/11707800-alice-s-adventure...

It's noticable worse than the examples in the blog post. I mean, it's good enough for listening, but no better than the competition.

It's vastly better than any TTS system I have used, but then I've only used a few (mainly phone assistants and the thing built into kindle).

What is the competition that you are referring to?

Yeah, as I mentioned I work in TTS and agree with you. If this is legit it is pretty amazing. Certainly would put them as one of the top providers especially given that they could ramp up voice selection. Also, if they truly are training on random stuff they would not have to pay royalties to voice actors since these voices don't exist. This is on par or better then most competitors i am aware of.

Thanks! ElevenLabs dev here - these are generated 6x faster than real-time, with latency of <1s. No corrections required.

We are working on long-form speech synthesis too, needless to say, the audio reading the article has been also synthesized by a voice that does not exist.

Ok I think it's fair to say you're either full of shit or the world leading experts in TTS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com