Do people really hate text-to-speech voices?
by Marc PomaredeIn January 2020, I have launched a website with a conversational AI for language learning.
Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) refers to technologies, like chatbots, which users can exchange messages with.
With the first version of the website, the users can only send written messages.
I have received feedback from users who want to listen to the messages, so I have started to investigate on the available APIs for text-to-speech.
I have realized that the AI voices were getting really close to natural human voices.
The biggest problem for me is that the AI will fail to read correctly some unusual words, so you still have to double check the result to be 100% sure of the result (If you hire a voice-over talent on a freelance platform, you still have to double check the result anyway).
You can find comments and articles online about people hating artificial voices, like in this article about TikTok synthetic voices.
https://beyondwords.io/blog/heres-why-people-hate-tiktoks-text-to-speech-voices/
"TikTok's synthetic voices sound robotic, too. Even if you ignore mispronunciations, their tone and inflections often sound very unnatural."
I think that some people hate artificial voices because the first time they have listened to a synthetic voice, it was an inferior one.
We are already at the point where the best AI voices are sounding almost natural, especially for the non native speakers.
With AI voices, most people can now produce audios and videos voice-overs, without having a proper place and audio equipment to record their content.
Right now for me it would be impossible to record an audio because a neighbor is blasting music on his radio, and my kids can randomly start to shout at each other because of their petty fight.
Of course the AI voices will never compete with the best voice-over talents. Human voice-overs and AI voice-overs should coexist without problem.
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This is a really cool product! I love how you can try it right off the landing page. It was quick and easy to try and the result was pretty cool even though the voice AI got the intonation wrong in one part.
I just ran it with the comment above and it's... OK.
What inspired you to build this? Did you need to record a bunch of videos from text yourself?
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I use it in 2 ways:
- convert some of my blog articles into videos to reach a bigger audience.
- convert copyright free content into videos.
It's useful if you want to create a video in a short time, like if an event is trending today, if you are the first who publishes a video you can have a lot of views.
So far the use cases are video creation in the fields of:
Tech news
Education
Low-Cost Marketing
Drama short stories -
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
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I fully agree. Text to speech voices have become really good. Some people only complain after they learn that the voice is artificial. I think that's still a prejudice from the old times when tts boxes really sounded robotic.
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I have a great experience with this extension ' Text-to-speech ' this extension have naturally human voices for audio conversion.
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We built something similar here-
https://www.thinkevolveconsulting.com/surubhi/
How many users have you onboarded ?
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Thousands of users are creating videos on the website.
The interest is there.
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cool! whats the growth strategy that you are using. that's if you want to share it. I am fine if you say that you do not want to share.
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I have to find out which video creation features have more potential and should be added.
And at the same time I have to keep the website easy to use. :)
I prefer to attract potential customers with interesting contents rather than paid advertising.
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