
Ask HN: Who makes the most advanced text-to-speech technology? - oftenwrong
I want to convert some articles and books to audio so that I can listen to them while walking. I would like to try the current leader in commercially-available text-to-speech.<p>I have tried a few text-to-speech offerings, such as the ones included in Firefox and macOS, but they sound robotic to the point that they are difficult to listen to. The pacing is unnatural. I am hoping there is something available that is better.
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dbish
Have you tried AWS Polly?
[https://aws.amazon.com/polly/](https://aws.amazon.com/polly/)

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GFischer
Seconded, AWS Polly should be good, there's also Bing Speech

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-
service...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-
services/speech/)

Google WaveNet promises even better audio, but it's not available yet. In my
experience, Amazon is "good enough".

[https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-
audio...](https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/)

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eggie5
although, not a commercially available product, the SOTA for text-to-speach
just came out this week and it's called TacoTron 2
[https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/ind...](https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/index.html)

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5mixer
This might not be very helpful if you are looking for specific texts to be
read, but it might be worth trying to find human spoken texts (audio books and
so on). Even some medium articles have spoken copies, if I remember correctly.

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oftenwrong
I do use audio books, and audio versions of articles when available.

