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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

This has been possible for quite a long time (probably 1-2 years). There are multiple open models that can do this quite well. Recent example from my YT feed:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WENMgQE9tws

Gemini 3.8 "Flash" says hello

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.

Please don't say Nu Trek.

Lower decks obviously

You might find this interesting, it seems to be exactly what you need to make an audio drama: https://github.com/Finrandojin/alexandria-audiobook

Also the Qwen3-TTS demo is cool, you can describe the voice you want: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS

I came across both on this subreddit, it's very active: https://www.reddit.com/r/TextToSpeech/

I'm personally using this locally: https://github.com/mateogon/pdf-narrator (it's a Python frontend for Kokoro) on my M1 Macbook Air (from 2020, with 8GB RAM) and it's incredible. I make my own audiobooks now - for free!

My favorite voice is am_michael and here's a sample: https://voicerankings.com/voice/kokoro-82M/male/am_michael/s...

Then I think what this guy is doing with local Star Trek voice cloning is right up your alley:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jDudeaWppSE

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

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.

Until the end of the year, then double that. And that's only the audi output though the text input shouldn't cost much in comparison.

Official pricing can be seen here: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing#gemini-3.8-fla...

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.

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

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

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

Related, for embedding small models, this lib is incredible.

Having a voice under 1Mo is crazy, even if it sounds robotic.

https://tts.ampixa.com/sanoTTS/

Great price at least until December 31 too.

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".

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?

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.

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

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

If you use Chrome on Android, there is a "Listen to this page" option in the menu.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/14768725?hl=en

For on the go, I’ve been using ElevenReader. Technically not free but their free tier has been plenty for me.

I vibed a wikipodcast app that has a wikipedia dump, gemma llm for search and summarization and a tts model for audio gen so I could just ask about topics while on the go, and the app would just go off and tell me stuff out of the Wikipedia database.

It was especially nice during a bike trip along the Rhine, I listened to a lot of the history of the industrial area and its cities.

Browser extension? Try these: http://www.paper2audio.com/ https://freevoicereader.com/ https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/sza-text-to-speech/... https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/flow-tts/hknidankih...

I found all these on this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TextToSpeech/

I've also see comments like "Microsoft Edge's read-aloud feature is amazing for TTS" but I haven't tried it myself.

Personally I use Kokoro with a python front-end on my Macbook, I linked to it in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49818923 it outputs MP3, so I just copy those to my phone and listen as audiobooks.

It’s just a woman’s voice…

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.

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

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.

[delayed]

Pricing isn't noted.

he's vibe writing

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

Because building my own is a better way to understand the capabilities of the model and how to use it - and to verify that it can be used via CORS.

here is a competitor, if someone wants to compare https://gradium.ai/

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

Where is "pro"?

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

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

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.

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.

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

Seriously. It's very annoying. Add to that the corporate Google Workspace also getting models later

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

Honestly I think their approach is the long term most useful one. Being SOTA is probably very costly and difficult. Optimising all the smaller stuff that's real world useful for people seems like it would have better long term use.

On top of that I would imagine the research side of Google might disk over things from one modality being useful to another - something like an audio optimising or memory optimising for text to speech could maybe also be useful for translation or world models. Etc etc

HN: Lament devs losing jobs to AI

Also HN: Fuck those voice actors and their careers.

My ROFLcopter goes: SOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOISOI