Google Introduces Cloud Text-to-Speech powered by DeepMind WaveNet tech

[Webwork]

From [cloudplatform.googleblog.com ]

Many Google products (e.g., the Google Assistant, Search, Maps) come with built-in high-quality text-to-speech synthesis that produces natural sounding speech. Developers have been telling us they’d like to add text-to-speech to their own applications, so today we’re bringing this technology to Google Cloud Platform with Cloud Text-to-Speech.
You can use Cloud Text-to-Speech in a variety of ways, for example:

• To power voice response systems for call centers (IVRs) and enabling real-time natural language conversations
  
• To enable IoT devices (e.g., TVs, cars, robots) to talk back to you
  
• To convert text-based media (e.g., news articles, books) into spoken format (e.g., podcast or audiobook)

I sense a shift in the force.

[Robert Charlton]

Yes, I've been reading reviews that Google's voice synthesis is able to add nuances like natural sounding inflections, so it's voices don't sound as robot-like as the kind of speech synthesis we've gotten used to up until now.

Google's also been getting high marks for the quality of content in its voice responses.

[TheRealSaxman]

In other news... Google merges with little known company SkyNet...