INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text APIs are getting a bunch of updates today that introduce support for more languages, make it
easier to hear auto-generated voices on different speakers and that promise better transcripts thanks to improved tools for speaker
recognition, among other things.
With this update, the Cloud Text-to-Speech API is now also generally available.
Let look at the details
The highlight of the release for many developers is probably the launch of the 17 new WaveNet-based voices in a number of new languages
WaveNet is Google technology for using machine learning to create these text-to-speech audio files
The result of this is a more natural sounding voice.
With this update, the Text-to-Speech API now supports 14 languages and variants and
features a total of 30 standard voices and 26 WaveNet voices.
If you want to try out the new voices, you can use Google demo with your own
text here.
Another interesting new feature here is the beta launch of audio profiles
The idea here is to optimize the audio file for the medium you&ll use to play it
Your phone speaker is different from the soundbar underneath your TV, after all
With audio profiles, you can optimize the audio for phone calls, headphones and speakers, for example.
On the Speech-to-Text side, Google
is now making it easier for developers to transcribe samples with multiple speakers
Using machine learning, the service can now recognize the different speakers (though you still have to tell it how many speakers there are
in a given sample) and it&ll then tag every word with a speaker number
If you have a stereo file of two speakers (maybe a call center agent on the left and the angry customer who called to complain on the
right), Google can now use those channels to distinguish betweenspeakers, too.
Also new is support for multiple languages
That something Google Search App already supports and the company is now making this available to developers, too
Developers can choose up to four languages and the Speech-to-Text API will automatically determine which language is spoken.
And finally,
the Speech-to-Text API now also returns word-level confidence scores
That may sound like a minor thing — and it already returned scores for each segment of speech — but Google notes that developers can now
use this to build apps that focus on specific words
&For example, if a user inputs ‘please set up a meeting with John for tomorrow at 2PM&into your app, you can decide to prompt the user to
repeat ‘John& or ‘2PM,& if either have low confidence, but not to reprompt for ‘please& even if has low confidence since it not
critical to that particular sentence,& the team explains.
