🎙️ AI-Powered Audio: From Expressive Speech to Quality Control
Startup School Deep Dive: Generative Media & Text-to-Speech
This week at Startup School, we dove deep into the fascinating world of AI-Powered Audio and Generative Media. Our experts, Akanksha Sabusari and Hussein Chinoy, walked us through Google Cloud’s powerful suite of Text-to-Speech (TTS) models and how startups can leverage them for expressive voice generation and rigorous quality control.
Here are the key takeaways and offerings discussed in the session. 👇
🚀 Three Pillars of Google Cloud’s Audio Generation
Google Cloud offers three distinct solutions on Vertex AI for audio generation, each tailored to different startup use cases:
1. Gemini Live API: Real-Time Conversation 🗣️
The Go-To for Live Interaction: This is the model for any real-time, low-latency, conversational experience. Think interactive voice assistants or customer service agents.
Multimodal Power: The Gemini Live API handles multimodal input, meaning it can process text, voice, and even video data to generate its responses.
Key Features: It supports infinite session lengths and has built-in “barging in” capability, allowing users to naturally interrupt the agent.
2. Gemini TTS: Maximum Control via Prompting ✍️
Expressive & Emotion-Driven: This model is all about customization. You can control the tone, pace, and style of the generated audio using natural language prompts, just like directing a voice actor.
Flexible Dialogue: It supports multi-speaker dialogue, making it perfect for creating realistic podcast segments, narrated stories, or advertising spots.
Global Reach: Offers over 30 voice options across more than 80 languages.
3. Chirp 3: HD Voices & Precision 🔊
High-Definition Quality: Chirp 3 is ideal for high-quality, low-latency audio streaming in non-multimodal contexts.
Instant Custom Voice: A standout feature is the ability to create a consistent, custom voice for your brand with as little as 10-15 seconds of audio training data.
Multilingual Transcription: Chirp 3 is natively multilingual, trained on over 100 languages, and includes advanced features like speaker diarization and word-level timestamps.
🔬 Practical Application & Workflows
The session included demos highlighting how to get hands-on with these models:
Vertex AI Studio: The central hub for interacting with Gemini and Chirp models, offering a media playground for testing and configuration.
Pronunciation Control: Demonstrated how Chirp 3 allows for granular control over pronunciation using precise phonetic input (IPA/Ex-Sampa) for tricky names or brand terms.
Quality Evaluation: A powerful workflow was shown where Gemini itself is used to evaluate the quality of the generated audio, providing a score, a description, and technical metrics—creating an essential feedback loop for production.
Script-to-Podcast: A complete end-to-end example showed how the Gemini CLI can analyze documents, write a multi-turn podcast script, and then use Gemini TTS and Chirp 3 voices to synthesize the final audio.