Hacker News

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

> Pet peeve on Google's AI rollouts: there's no alignment across the three platforms they have...

just remember: despite they would have you believe they are are a united front... they are better thought of as a "loose federation of warring tribes".

An education account I have lists 3.1 Pro, and 3.6 Thinking and Flash as the available models in the app.

My personal account, 3.6 Flash Lite and 3.5 Thinking.

Meanwhile, I can go hog wild and drain my bank account on GCP. I don’t though, because my family has to eat.

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.

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?

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

I've been working on a similar project all year and as a tip, you should try Fish Audio or Higgs as a replacement for Qwen3. Both yield much better prosody and are much easier to listen to for long runs.

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

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?

<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.

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

Original series or Next Generation?

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.

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

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.

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

Does it detect synthesized consent recordings?

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'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.

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

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

Example (topical, pelican themed) audio clip here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/23/gemini-tts-playground/

Why tho? AI Studio has this model available and I don't need to paste the API key anywhere

https://aistudio.google.com/generate-speech?model=gemini-3.8...

Very expensive?

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

Um, what?

The gemma 4 models are pretty great

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

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

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

IMHO its obviously: they cant compete with SotA models in benchmaxxing. They can and do compete on price though.

Probably $$$ and limit to internal compute. Rumour is they even internal google employees have trouble getting compute for AI stuff. Guessing they're pretty slammed infrastructure wise with adding AI answers to default Google searches

Yes, I find nearly every "SOTA" voice model I try intolerable to listen to because of the fake exaggerated expression/emotion. It's actively distracting because it pulls focus to emphasize randomly. ChatGPT Voice models are so insufferable to put up with for a conversation longer than 45 seconds.

All I want is a clear, technically flawless, even/restrained "computer voice" for pretty much every use case (except audiobooks). But that doesn't make for splashy demos/score well for RLHF raters.

It’s just a woman’s voice…

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