jazz3020

I agree and I'm saddened that it's a deal breaker for you. Unfortunately, we do not have infrastructure to offer pay-as-you-go (actually pretty challenging ops). We're forced to target a smaller niche today and expand in the future (i.e. offer pay-as-you-go).

But for those who are already spending, let's say, $250+ a month on TTS, this is a sweet deal. They are my initial target customers.

We're sampling the Neural AWS Polly Matthew voice. FYI: Neural Matthew ($16/1M chars): https://unreal-tts-live-demo.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/aws/... Standard Matthew ($4/1M chars): https://unreal-tts-live-demo.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/aws/...

Well, our $250/mo is at $2.6 per 1M chars which is even cheaper than Standard Matthew, and I think ours clearly sounds better?

Everyone's working on emotional expressiveness right now. Many researches published left & right!

No it’s not. I think it’s how the mp3 is somehow played in the browser maybe. It happens to me too.

Nope, I’m sorry for the confusion. We did use title-cased letters in our logos to reduce similarity (their logo is all-cap: UNREAL ENGINE)

Right off the bat, the third sentence looks much more like what my data looks like, and the kind of text I wanted people to use it for. Where is the line from?

Haha, I really appreciate this feedback. Everything I wanted to hear.

Frankly, trying to fight against the Goliath, with 0 marketing budget, and I’m desperately hoping to create noise. Breaking a rule or two is something AWS can’t do at their scale.

On the bulk offering, I do have a clear path forward. In short, I can create new synthetic voices. It’s like those this-person-does-not-exist images but for voice. “unreal speech”

I’d say businesses that already spend $$$ on a 3rd party TTS service and know how expensive it is or have content but haven’t pulled the trigger due to the prohibitive cost. I wrote this on the Product Hunt page: > “… read aloud apps (e.g. Pocket, Speechify, etc), UGC platforms (e.g. Medium, SubStack, etc), publications (e.g. Bloomberg, NY Times, etc), and e-learning platforms (e.g. Duolingo, Pearson, etc). We’re also interested in providing discounts to non-profits (e.g. Wikipedia, etc)”

Yo! Let’s at least chat and brainstorm about it. Would you want to ping me on twitter? @automationism

I greatly appreciate the feedback!

I agree on the table idea to more candidly and clearly compare other aspects. This launch/experiment was that the quality/cost would be the main factors, and we’d go from there, iterating and customizing it to work for early customers.

The 8x math is per 1M characters. I do see that since we’re charging a subscription, it may not be a fair comparison. But the minimum commitment is is so small that I thought it wouldn’t matter for the customers I’m targeting right now. I do think it can be misleading because people might expect pay-as-you-go.

We aren’t able to provide pay-as-you-go right now, so I’ll look into updating the copy or how we communicate the subscription model!

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

Yup, trying to fix this

Which ones do you have in mind?

English only, no SSML. This was probably the least minimal MVP I've built so far, though. Gotta still iterate. SSML is prob more important than non-English for now.

That's a great insight. I'll look into the Github/Copilot more. I can't code without Copilot anymore and that piques my interest. But yeah, we def need politically neutral voices.

Yes, that's true. We're currently not targeting side projects at the moment as we do not have infrastructure to do so. I hope do be able to support smaller developers (like myself) soon. Step-by-step!

This is fantastic feedback! The "mashed up words" are something I'm trying to fix. And I totally agree that the AWS voice is much more clear. Maybe we can get to clear & natural before AWS?

The stuff on GCP is a long story, which makes us an edge case. "Amazon still wins" is generally the case. Hold on to the stock.

Well, sure, I mean MS is a 2T company with 180K employees. So I wouldn't be too surprised if theirs sounds better than mine. The tortoise tts repo seems pretty random though. Are you trying to promote something of your own or something? haha

Honestly, I'm super happy that you found one voice arguable better than AWS.

I might argue, though, you might get used to our voices quickly once you start using it frequently. I've had this feedback before from someone who was very used to AWS's monotonous voice, and he actually changed his opinion after listening to a couple of articles. Previously, I built https://audioread.com which got me to talk to a bunch of users.

Well, not exactly! We have clusters on GCP actually, sorry to break the news. But we did train models on AWS.

The service is for businesses. For them, tens of millions of characters per month is not much at all. And they'd integrate the API and provide services to end-users/consumers. I can see how one could find it disingenuous, though, although I don't 100% agree.

Thank you. What do you suggest I do? Remove the professor and entrepreneur voices?

Hey, thanks for the comment. The "sample" must've been pulled from the "random" feature. It basically shows texts other people have tried. This feature might have been a bad idea. I'm sorry if it offended you in any way. Not sure if I have ability to moderate the content. Do you think it's best if remove the "random" feature altogether?

This is incorrect. The AWS example is Polly Neural Matthew voice which costs $16, not $4. Neural Matthew: https://unreal-tts-live-demo.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/aws/... Standard Matthew: https://unreal-tts-live-demo.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/aws/...

Hmm, when I demoed around, people pretty much unanimously picked the voice as the best-sounding one.

Yeah, 100% working on the artifacts. I also agree on the stiltedness, not sure how to go about fixing it yet.

No, this is not related to the site you mentioned, but it seems like a bad sign.

I'm not. I'll try to reach out and figure out a license of some sort. I suspect the royalties we could pay out is probably negligible. I think it might be safest for me to get rid of the "recognizable" voices and simply create new synthetic voices that are not of real people.

Currently, yes.

Oh, got it. You mean it doesn't pronounce "$99/mo" correctly? Yeah, there are quite a few cases like this where we don't translate symbols, abbreviations, etc quite right, yet. But unfortunately, in this case, I spelled out "$99 per month" but it still sounds awkward.