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Comment by atlasunshrugged | Hacker News Reader

I just tried it out and I have to say I am blown away. I've never been someone who likes the voice capabilities (tried Siri once or twice, hated it) for just about any service as I can type pretty quickly but this is intelligent enough that I can have an unstructured conversation and still get to the results I want quickly. Very impressive.

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Well, Siri is not doing it because its „intelligence“ basically sounds to a bunch of if-then-else statements. It’s still the most embarrassing Apple thing in existence. So very bad.

The best part about Siri is that what it replaced was insanely better at the specific task of reproducing music. Why does my iPhone in 2023 need to connect to the internet and shamefully fail when I try to play a song or even change the volume.

If anyone still remembers what we had before Siri, you’ll know how well it worked.

Voice Assistant is still available and you can revert to it instead of Siri in Settings.

I just got the Rayban Meta glasses an hour ago, put them on, said "Hey Meta" and I was interacting with an AI with my voice, and hearing a response back. It's so unbelievable and surreal I don't understand why Siri/Google assistant are not doing this already.

I really feel like I live in the future.

> I don't understand why Siri/Google assistant are not doing this already.

My theory is that voice assistants are made to be cheap entry points to those ecosystems. LLMs, on the other hand, are incredibly expensive to run. No GAFAM wants to pay dozens of cents when you ask their assistant to switch on the lights.

looks like Meta has no problem paying. It's usable on Messenger/WhatsApp/Rayban Meta

I feel blown away and creeped out at the same time. It sounds so natural that's it's creepy. Only question I have now is that is audio being streamed or generated on device.

I'm almost sure its streamed

It is streamed. They also offer this as an API for developers [0].

I just wish they'd offer more languages as it currently is English only. It can speak German and Spanish, but with a very clear English accent, which makes it kind of funny and makes one think about why the accent sounds so real.

[0] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/text-to-speech

The Brazilian Portuguese accent was hilarious when I tried it a month ago. We thought it was some kind of joke we didn't understand.

Just tried now, and it was pretty good. Some slight accent that I wasn't able to detect (Minas Gerais?). Similar / better than the artificial voice of other assistants in pt-br. I'm using Sky's voice, FWIW.

When I tried it right when it was released, it was some really heavy accent from Piracicaba. People there talk like that but ChatGPT seemed to be doing a forced impression of that.

It seems similar to what other commenters are saying about it taking in German with an American accent.

It's no big deal but Siri/Google/Alexa voices are better normalized, IMHO. I don't mind heavy accents at all in humans but they get annoying after a while for a voice assistants, especially if it's not my accent :)

I tried it now but it doesn't seem to be working for me. Maybe related to the outage yesterday (is it still going on?). It just listens but never replied.

Which voice did you pick? I picked one that sounds amazing, only has a funny gringo accent.

ChatGPT version works for any language

Yes, there it sounds just perfect. The best TTS I've ever heard.

> It can speak German and Spanish

Among others...

Had to check myself.

> Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Maori, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Welsh.

I'm playing with it now, It can listen in Russian, reply in English or Russian.

The English pronunciation is perfect, but some Russian words do not have the correct pronounciation or emphasis.

I'm wondering if I can train the model to pronounce these words more accurately.

The new model on the front page atm (StyleTTS) is found to be more humanlike than actual human voice.

Even takes an audible breath. I'm kind of annoyed at that actually, it's deceptive.

That's lame. Why are they making it pretend to be human? What a silly thing to put effort into.

It's learned, not programmed. It would take more effort to remove every breath.

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