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Comment by guerrilla

1 day ago

I don't understand the comments here at all. I played the audio and it sounds absolutely horrible, far worse than computer voices sounded fifteen years ago. Not even the most feeble minded person would mistake that as a human. Am I not hearing the same thing everyone else is hearing? It sounds straight up corrupted to me. Tested in different browsers, no difference.

As I said, some reference voices can lead to bad voice quality. But if it sounds that bad, it’s probably not it. Would love to dig into it if you want

  • I agree with the comment above. I have not logged into hacker news in _years_ but did so today just to weigh in here. If people are saying that the audio sounds great, then there is definitely something going on with a subset of users where we are only hearing garbled words with a LOT of distortion. This does not sound like natural speech to met at all. It sounds more like a warped cassette tape. And I do not mean to slight your work at all. I am actually incredibly puzzled here to understand why my perception of this is so radically different from others!

    • Thank you for commenting. I wonder if this could be another situation like "the dress" (2015) or maybe something is wrong with our codecs...

      3 replies →

Yes, if this selected piece is the best that was available to be used as a showcase, it's immediately off putting in distortion and mangling of pronunciation.

same here, tried few different voices including my kids and my own, the generated audio is not similar at all, it's not even a proper voice

Thank you, I was scrolling and scrolling in utter disbelief. It sounds absolutely dreadful. Would drive me nuts to listen to for more than a minute.