rcr-anti 1 hour ago

Pet peeve on Google's AI rollouts: there's no alignment across the three platforms they have, consumer, prosumer, cloud. Scroll to the end of every release, including this one, and you'll see different availabilities. The fun part is the models don't even have the same capabilities across platforms! Omni Flash, last I tried and read the docs, is video and text out on consumer and prosumer but video out only on GCP. So if your org disables consumer and prosumer, like mine, it's a coin flip whether you can use the fancy new models or what they can do.

simonw 3 hours ago

> Voice replication: Recreate consistent vocal profiles from just a 30-second audio sample of your voice or a voice you have the rights to use, backed by built-in consent verification, SynthID watermarking, and C2PA credentials to protect both developers and their vocal talent.

I guess voice cloning is widely enough available now from other providers that Google are no longer hesitant to ship it.

  • Multicomp 3 hours ago

    They probably do something similar to GPT-Live where they expect a given voice profile to send them a sample saying 'This is the owner of this voice and I consent for synthetic samples to be made of it'

    and/or local voice cloning is good enough as is so Google doesn't grant a uniquely liable ability?

    • gruez 2 hours ago

      >and/or local voice cloning is good enough as is so Google doesn't grant a uniquely liable ability?

      Probably the latter. Cat's already out of the bag to the extent that you can synthesize with a specific voice in one go and it sounds decent. Even if you need commercial models for better intonation or whatever, you can probably get the commercial models to first generate with a generic voice, then use a local model to transfer that to voice you're cloning. That'll probably get rid of any C2PA watermarks too.

  • miltonlost 3 hours ago

    "Don't be evil... unless other companies are doing it first"

    • imjonse 3 hours ago

      voice cloning is a tool, it is not necessarily evil, even though the scenarios it can be used for nefarious purposes outnumber the legitimate ones.

      • bakies 2 hours ago

        is the legit ones just like... putting carrie fisher in star wars?

        • gegtik 2 hours ago

          usually people bring up anyone who is losing physical control of their voice faculties, so they can have a synthetic voice that matches their natural voice

          • jolan 2 hours ago

            As an example of this, Sarah Langs uses a synthesized voice due to the progression of her ALS symptoms.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Langs

            • simonw 2 hours ago

              The iPhone has a built in voice cloner hidden in the accessibility settings for exactly this use-case: creating a backup of your voice in case you need it in the future.

    • gruez 2 hours ago

      I mean yeah? If google offers a cloud nmap tool, should everyone get in a tizzy about how google is "evil", even though it saves baddies maybe 5 minutes of work?

    • kmoser 2 hours ago

      Google granted themselves the authority be evil back in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

      • hbn 53 minutes ago

        It's still in their code of conduct, as the wikipedia article you linked mentioned

        https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...

        ctrl/cmd+f "evil"

        I don't know why this argument is brought up all the time anyway, it literally means nothing. They can name themselves "Don't Be Evil Inc" and continue to do evil stuff cause evil isn't an objective measure. If squeezing juice out of puppies made money, any business can just say it's "not evil."

        And if you think they're evil why would you trust them to follow their own guideline of not doing evil? An evil corp would be more likely to just hide behind that phrase, not quietly remove it as some subtle hint that they want to be openly and proudly evil all of a sudden.

  • kingstnap 2 hours ago

    Yesterday night I was doing a project with QwenTTS 1.7B.

    After some debugging, making a clean dataset with clean recordings, and experimenting with a good fine tune recipe (much props to the new GPT models yesterday being cheaper).

    I was able to make a robo-me that sounds absurdly good, family was shocked, all in a matter of a few hours.

    So yeah the cat is out of the bag for sure.

    • yieldcrv 1 hour ago

      Its so crazy to me how prevalent bad AI voices are, when local models can do such good AI voices

      • pixl97 41 minutes ago

        Very few people explore the options they have and tend to stick with the first thing that works.

    • MacNCheese23 36 minutes ago

      Yeah I was doing that at the beginning of this year with voice samples locally from hollywood-stars with Qwen3-TTS.

      It took like 1min - capture something from a youtube or video and put in your own text. It worked also really good for a german test.

      Made a voice message for my wife from one of our favorite actors, telling here how nice it would be to make some breakfast :D

thangalin 3 hours ago

Here's a video of my Emotive Audiobook Creator, KeenLore, a locally hosted web app:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAeHgE94rVo

No cloud, no tokens to pay. Reads a book using a full cast of characters. Quotation attribution detection (for my novel) is at 97.2% accuracy (485/499 quotes identified and assigned correctly). The autofill of character voice descriptions uses the prose to determine how the character sounds.

Employs Gemma 4[1] for the prose analysis (voice fills, quotation detection) and Qwen3 TTS Voice Design[2] for creating voice samples. Runs on an 8GB NVIDIA T1000 GPU card, 96 GB RAM, and a AMD Ryzen 5 7600.

[1]: https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/

[2]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-Voice-Design

  • Multicomp 3 hours ago

    <grumble grumble people putting in links they expect you to follow to arbitrary goatse youtube videos for all I know>

    The title of the video is 'KeenLore - Emotive Audiobook Creator Demo' and it appears to be a web UI and some local stack that reads text files.

    • Jordan-117 2 hours ago

      Their first sentence literally tells you it's a video of their app? It's not a mystery-meat link.

  • loremm 3 hours ago

    It's cool technology and I read a lot of audiobooks, even hundreds of hours of TTS. I feel like my brain can fill in the character voices from the text - on the page it's not like they're different fonts.

    I understand audiobook narrators often do it, and that's fun. But it's not so critical in my opinion

  • talon8635 3 hours ago

    Our imaginations and minds continue to rot under the weight of endless and effortless entertainment

    • idiotsecant 42 minutes ago

      I guess I should feel bad about wanting to listen to audiobooks of novels that don't have audio while I drive

  • eru 58 minutes ago

    Awesome! I had been meaning to build something like this for a while now, but never got around to it.

    Is it possible to annotate your text with extra 'stage directions' that influence how the book is read out?

    • thangalin 45 minutes ago

      > annotate your text with extra 'stage directions'

      Good idea, not something I've considered yet. Wouldn't take much to add it since there's already a feature for selecting a quotation and assigning it an intonation. Same infrastructure could be reused to select arbitrary text and assign stage directions.

Multicomp 3 hours ago

I direct my own extended daydream Star Trek fanfic (okay, I'm on season 2 episode 17) and recently I looked to see if I could have each scene file be read aloud a la an audiobook or radio drama.

Getting GPT-Live to have unique enough voices and to be expressive with how I imagine the voices going in my head is hard to direct, there's not enough control there.

So this Gemini 3.8 specific large voice library and ability to tightly control (if you are willing to write a script) is nice to find, and while I'm not sure which of the 5,286 Gemini products this is, nor how to onboard and get started feeding this my own text files, nor what training will happen to my data if I did somehow use it, I love that the state of the industry is such that Google can do this and release it publicly, because that means eventually an equivalent product can come from someone else and be used locally / confidently that the generated audio or inputs won't be retained and misused.

seemaze 2 hours ago

My primary use case for TTS is converting written content (blogs, articles, etc.) in to clips I can listen to on the go.

Is there a good browser extension that does this with a flexible TTS backend? I know Qwen, Kokoro, and VibeVoice all have decent quality..

simonw 2 hours ago

I vibe coded a playground UI for trying this out. The conversation mode is neat, and it's very expensive - most of my experiments have cost less than a cent.

https://tools.simonwillison.net/gemini-tts-playground#compos...

  • eis 1 hour ago

    Nice but in general I wouldn't put my API key into some third party website, no matter if it claims to not store it. It's not something personal, you are a bit of a celeb here so I wouldn't think you'd save the keys, it's just good general data hygiene. Especially not if a leaked API key can rack up thousands of dollars in fees quickly.

    • simonw 1 hour ago

      Sure. Feel free to copy the code and run it yourself instead.

yipinwong 25 minutes ago

Google is spreading too thin, as gemini isn't really that intelligent.

They are creating gemini SOTA (not really any more), flash versions, text-to-speech, video (omni), etc.

I can see they want to create an ecosystem, but I see no focus in any one area.

accountrequired 2 hours ago

"users must provide a verbal consent recording from the voice owner that matches the reference speaker before a voice can be created"

How long is this stored? What could go wrong? :P

  • kmoser 2 hours ago

    Does it detect synthesized consent recordings?

    • pixl97 37 minutes ago

      There is no world in which something like that works over a few months.

Thaxll 1 hour ago

What is the best open model / tool for text to speech running locally?

  • x3haloed 1 hour ago

    I love PocketTTS. It's stupid fast and the voice quality is decent. But it's not the highest quality.

  • freedomben 1 hour ago

    I've been making audiobooks out of text files that I have lying around, and kokoro TTS has been phenomenal

  • VariousPrograms 1 hour ago

    I've got the best results with BreezeTTS, Higgs Audio v3, and Fish Audio S2 Pro. audio.cpp (https://github.com/0xShug0/audio.cpp) is an easy way to run a lot of different models.

    Different models have different strengths. If you throw an entire ebook at a model you're going to get a different result than if you craft a perfect 10 second sentence with a model that supports voice direction and emotion tags, so you should try a bunch depending on your use case.

  • rhdunn 1 hour ago

    It depends on what you are after (quality, legibility, performance, etc.).

    If you're after quality then Qwen3 TTS is a very good model esp. if you take some effort to craft a voice file. It is slow, so isn't practical for real-time voices (like assistants). It can also occasionally switch to a different voice to the one provided, so you may want to break up the text being processed.

    I've not yet tried other recent/recentish models.

    If you are after performance then two options from older models are:

    1. flite with a HTS (Hidden Markov Model) voice like cmu_us_rms (male) or cmu_us_slt (female);

    2. espeak/espeak-ng with an MBROLA (an Overlapped Add model) voice (mb-us1, mb-de5-en, etc.).

    Alternatively, you could try using Qwen3 TTS or over voice changing model with the CMU Arctic (http://www.festvox.org/cmu_arctic/) voice data which includes audio for the rms and slt voices among others.

    If you're feeling adventurous you could also try fine tuning one of the TTS models on that data to create a custom voice, though the data is likely to be in the training data for the voices, so using an audio sample may be sufficient depending on the TTS model.

112233 3 hours ago

"Super tinny monotone robotic voice" does not sound neither tinny nor monotone. Compared to what TTS from 90s sounded like. Or even how actors impersonated robots in movies. Has the model been eating too much hype DJs?

  • burkaman 2 hours ago

    None of these examples are really what the prompt asked for. It's just like image models, once you get over how unbelievable it is that a computer produced this you realize the result isn't actually what you want.

xnx 3 hours ago

Would be great if this would power the Google Books app feature. The voice system there is pretty out of date.

  • mamudo 3 hours ago

    Yes, I am quite disappointed by seeing all this cool AI stuff and yet the same Play Books. Come on, it is the best place to apply AI, in my opinion.

  • laweijfmvo 3 hours ago

    the ratio of new voice models i see on hackernews to the number actually deployed in any product i use is approximately infinity.

nater5000 2 hours ago

It's giving me an error when I try to generate a voice with Voice Design in AI Studio. It also says voice replication isn't available in my region.

Also weird that there are no "neutral gender" voices in the English language. There's also limited "use cases," like the "Gaming" use case is empty?

And there's no pricing listed anywhere.

I don't know, I guess their roll out is a bit sloppy. It's a bit of a shame, though, since the voices which are available all sound like generic Gemini voices to me. Nothing stands out is being particularly interesting or impressive about this.

hatingisok 19 minutes ago

My ROFLcopter goes: SOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOI

AyanamiKaine 46 minutes ago

Still, all voices sound like they are missing something only real human speech can sound like. But many people will not notice the difference between AI and normal voices.

  • pixl97 38 minutes ago

    So you're saying they are up to support tech afterb5 hours on the same call... the soul has left their body.

burkaman 3 hours ago

Seems like voice actors are safe for now. This is technologically incredible, but the results are really not very good, and usually not particularly close to the prompt. In basically all of these examples some core part of the prompt is completely ignored.

  • avazhi 2 hours ago

    > Seems like voice actors are safe for now. This is technologically incredible, but the results are really not very good,

    Um, what?

    • burkaman 2 hours ago

      Technologically incredible as in "I cannot believe it's possible for a computer to do this" and not very good as in "these examples are not what was prompted and I can't think of a use case where these would be acceptable".

      Imagine someone showing you that they've trained their dog to hold a paintbrush and paint. There would be no contradiction between "this is incredible" and "these paintings suck".

  • kanbankaren 1 hour ago

    Probably.

    I listened to some of the voices. The male voices are believable while all the female voices sound the same and artificial. For some reason, it also reminds me of the voices in Toy Story movies.

    Bias in the training data?

nitroedge 2 hours ago

Couldn't see this in the article, does it support API calls for one-shot conversation type responses like ElevenLabs offers?

$0.50 per hour pricing could last a long time with back and forth conversation use.

sgc 3 hours ago

Sorry if this is in that article, but I am on my phone and can't see it. How much would this cost to batch generate an audiobook? Right now I just listen to things in the 11 labs app which is free, but I would rather just generate audio files.

  • thevinter 3 hours ago

    Roughly 5-10$ for 10h, assuming you few-shot it.

    Price per hour:

    - 3.8 Flash TTS, standard: $0.81

    - 3.8 Flash TTS, batch: $0.41

    - 3.8 Flash‑Lite TTS, standard: $0.54

    - 3.8 Flash‑Lite TTS, batch: $0.27

    • sgc 2 hours ago

      That is the biggest difference here for me. I have not looked at every solution, but many. They are either much more expensive or garbage quality. For example my next target audiobook is a monster 250k words, 1.5m characters, so about $15 here or $75 using elevenlabs (0.05 per 1k characters). For me that is the difference between I will or I won't use it.

LarsDu88 2 hours ago

I've been trying to track the SOTA for years switching between wavenet on Gcloud, to Azure, to ElevenLabs, and now Fish.audio. This is damn good

cainxinth 2 hours ago

They keep announcing new 3.8 variants. I wonder why they still haven't updated 3.1 Pro yet.

fullstackwife 2 hours ago

It would be nice to have sound effect generation (use case: games)

UmYeahNo 25 minutes ago

HN: Lament devs losing jobs to AI

Also HN: Fuck those voice actors and their careers.

andrewstuart 3 hours ago

I’ve never found a TYS that does convincing British accents.

They all sound like Americans putting in their best fake British accent.

drewbitt 3 hours ago

Great price at least until December 31 too.

WarmWash 1 hour ago

I hope this spills over into more voices for android/android auto default assistant voices. The current choices are all so meh

talon8635 3 hours ago

Great. Now in additional to AI email responses I will get AIs impersonating my contacts on the phone too. Lovely.

m3kw9 2 hours ago

Still sounds AI, you can tell they exaggerate all the tone and trailing "high scoring expressive sounds" like your job depends on it.

xmorse 2 hours ago

Based on this video I think this model was trained on p*rn

https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...

  • droidjj 2 hours ago

    It’s just a woman’s voice…

  • hmokiguess 2 hours ago

    That argument says as much about the training as it says about your sexuality, you do realize that right.

    • xmorse 2 hours ago

      you can't use this model if it randomly moans between phrases

      • konart 2 hours ago

        Either you have posted link to a wrong video or we have a very different experience when it comes to moaning.

        Onomatopoeia? Sure it is there, and some fillers (or whatever you call those little sounds). But moans?

        • barrell 2 hours ago

          The first <sigh> does sound a lot like a moan. OP linked to the timestamp so I missed it when it first played. I was also confused but on second playback I heard the first <sigh> and also thought wtf.

          I would not want that in my product.