7 ms·

Show HN: Super fast/cheap text-to-speech API

43 points by jazz3020 3y ago

aragonite 3y ago
Very impressive. I tested it with: In Sioux City the Taoiseach parked his coupe by the quay overlooking a fjord. Nearby, a bugle played an octave, children savored sherbet and quinoa with acai, and an artisan sold bagels next to ancient-inspired rouge. And it got most of the (irregularly spelt) words pronounced correctly except for 'quinoa' and 'acai'. Just for fun, I also tested some tongue twisters. For some reason, I find it psychologically very difficult to listen to perfectly spoken tongue twisters — almost as if some sort of nail on chalkboard effect is going on! The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick She sells sea-shells by the sea-shore. The shells she sells are sea-shells, I'm sure. For if she sells sea-shells by the sea-shore Then I'm sure she sells sea-shore shells.
- vjulian 3y ago
  [dead]
- ericrallen 3y ago
  Honestly, I second guess myself any time I have to say “quinoa” or “açaí” out loud.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jazz3020 3y ago
  OP here. Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, those are some pretty tough sentences (obviously not in the dataset). The tongue twister one is really interesting.
doomrobo 3y ago
How is this cheaper than Google TTS? Google's standard voices are $4 per million characters. And the deep learning ones are $16 per million characters, same as this offering. Plus Google gives you the first 1M free every month. https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing
- str3wer 3y ago
  just checked and the free 1M is also available on this website
  - crackedbassoon 3y ago
    Only one time.
- jazz3020 3y ago
  OP here. The more you use, the cheaper it gets. But if you're not using much, there isn't any cost-saving benefits. Once you scale to ~60M characters per month, it's 50% cheaper. In other words, if you're at a stage where you spend $1,000/mo on text-to-speech, you'd spend $500/mo instead.
  - crackedbassoon 3y ago
    Do you support SSML and other languages besides English? The demo site suggests not, and I couldn’t explore further without signing up. This service might be cheaper than Google at scale, but if I needed 60M chars a month I’d probably care about those features.
pcdoodle 3y ago
My computers fans ramped up visiting your site.
- jazz3020 3y ago
  Ah, that must be because of the render in the background. Maybe we should turn that off.
  - pcdoodle 3y ago
    Granted my GPU is from 2011. But we're still out here.
  - latexr 3y ago
    > Maybe we should turn that off. Definitely. Even on an M1 it made the page sluggish. I could feel its effect by moving the slider. When I deleted the div.glow-animation with the browser’s DevTools, it became way snappier.
latexr 3y ago
The pitch slider works in increments of 0.01 but for some reason we can’t set 1.0, it jumps from 0.99 to 1.01. Same with the speed slider, it goes from -1% to +1%, no 0% (or “Normal” as you call it when the page is refreshed).
- jazz3020 3y ago
  Oh, interesting. What browser are you using? I'm able to set to 0.
  - latexr 3y ago
    Safari on macOS.
JZL003 3y ago
If you did give a pay as you go, price per character I'd be very interested. I know small-medium scale personal use isn't necessarily your target but I turn a lot of audiobooks into audio. Even on big months it's only 1-1.5 million characters Or even if I could buy 1 month and then use those credits over multiple successive months I would really start considering it. It's nicer on my ears than even GCP's new neural voices, and I've listened to over 1k hours over the past year or two
- JZL003 3y ago
  Also 1M one time does go very fast compared to GCP's 1M per month
diggum 3y ago
Any eye toward allowing users to train their own voices? The only reason I’m using Elevenlabs is because I can train a suite of voices on my (legit, legal) archival content. It’s not a perfect replication of the original voice, usually, but for my purposes, this isn’t a requirement. What it does get is the artifacts, recording environment, and a large swath of the prosony and other voice elements that make it sound real and not AI
anoy8888 3y ago
Anyone knows a good open source alternative what natural sounding voices ?
tinytera 3y ago
This is actually pretty cool. I am hitting a limit with my elevenlabs subscription soon for this app https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37696033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37696033 Going to replace with yours to see how it goes. Cheers!
svth 3y ago
English-language only text-to-speech.

43 points by jazz3020 3y ago

Very impressive. I tested it with: In Sioux City the Taoiseach parked his coupe by the quay overlooking a fjord. Nearby, a bugle played an octave, children savored sherbet and quinoa with acai, and an artisan sold bagels next to ancient-inspired rouge. And it got most of the (irregularly spelt) words pronounced correctly except for 'quinoa' and 'acai'. Just for fun, I also tested some tongue twisters. For some reason, I find it psychologically very difficult to listen to perfectly spoken tongue twisters — almost as if some sort of nail on chalkboard effect is going on! The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick She sells sea-shells by the sea-shore. The shells she sells are sea-shells, I'm sure. For if she sells sea-shells by the sea-shore Then I'm sure she sells sea-shore shells.

vjulian 3y ago
[dead]
ericrallen 3y ago
Honestly, I second guess myself any time I have to say “quinoa” or “açaí” out loud.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jazz3020 3y ago
OP here. Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, those are some pretty tough sentences (obviously not in the dataset). The tongue twister one is really interesting.

doomrobo 3y ago

How is this cheaper than Google TTS? Google's standard voices are $4 per million characters. And the deep learning ones are $16 per million characters, same as this offering. Plus Google gives you the first 1M free every month. https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/pricing

str3wer 3y ago
just checked and the free 1M is also available on this website
- crackedbassoon 3y ago
  Only one time.
jazz3020 3y ago
OP here. The more you use, the cheaper it gets. But if you're not using much, there isn't any cost-saving benefits. Once you scale to ~60M characters per month, it's 50% cheaper. In other words, if you're at a stage where you spend $1,000/mo on text-to-speech, you'd spend $500/mo instead.
- crackedbassoon 3y ago
  Do you support SSML and other languages besides English? The demo site suggests not, and I couldn’t explore further without signing up. This service might be cheaper than Google at scale, but if I needed 60M chars a month I’d probably care about those features.

pcdoodle 3y ago

My computers fans ramped up visiting your site.

jazz3020 3y ago
Ah, that must be because of the render in the background. Maybe we should turn that off.
- pcdoodle 3y ago
  Granted my GPU is from 2011. But we're still out here.
- latexr 3y ago
  > Maybe we should turn that off. Definitely. Even on an M1 it made the page sluggish. I could feel its effect by moving the slider. When I deleted the div.glow-animation with the browser’s DevTools, it became way snappier.

latexr 3y ago

The pitch slider works in increments of 0.01 but for some reason we can’t set 1.0, it jumps from 0.99 to 1.01. Same with the speed slider, it goes from -1% to +1%, no 0% (or “Normal” as you call it when the page is refreshed).

jazz3020 3y ago
Oh, interesting. What browser are you using? I'm able to set to 0.
- latexr 3y ago
  Safari on macOS.

JZL003 3y ago

If you did give a pay as you go, price per character I'd be very interested. I know small-medium scale personal use isn't necessarily your target but I turn a lot of audiobooks into audio. Even on big months it's only 1-1.5 million characters Or even if I could buy 1 month and then use those credits over multiple successive months I would really start considering it. It's nicer on my ears than even GCP's new neural voices, and I've listened to over 1k hours over the past year or two

JZL003 3y ago
Also 1M one time does go very fast compared to GCP's 1M per month

diggum 3y ago

Any eye toward allowing users to train their own voices? The only reason I’m using Elevenlabs is because I can train a suite of voices on my (legit, legal) archival content. It’s not a perfect replication of the original voice, usually, but for my purposes, this isn’t a requirement. What it does get is the artifacts, recording environment, and a large swath of the prosony and other voice elements that make it sound real and not AI

anoy8888 3y ago

Anyone knows a good open source alternative what natural sounding voices ?

tinytera 3y ago

This is actually pretty cool. I am hitting a limit with my elevenlabs subscription soon for this app https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37696033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37696033 Going to replace with yours to see how it goes. Cheers!

svth 3y ago

English-language only text-to-speech.