Enterprise grade speech services for the ML generation
March 24, 2022
Enterprise grade speech services for the ML generation
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Speech to Text
- Text to Speech
- Custom Keywords
- Custom Commands
- Speech Translation
Overall Satisfaction with Azure Cognitive Speech Services
We use Azure Cognitive Speech Services to add speech to text, text to speech, and other AI-driven NLP-related speech services to our customised applications esp those involving chatbots for different business functions. The idea was to make use of speech services for mobile apps to make them hands-free and more accessible. The range of languages helped especially from an Indian context as only one competitor product could support as many Indian languages apart from a few European and middle eastern ones.
Pros
- APIs offered are very robust.
- Languages supported is far greater than most of its competitors.
- Integration with our custom apps was easy.
- Speech models that we created using neural voices were quite impressive.
- Translation services worked really well.
- Built in machine learning opens it to a lot more business use cases for the future.
Cons
- At times different accents can be an issue but over time with more data, this can be further improved esp with reinforcement learning.
- Price is on the higher side so ROI is slow to realise.
- For community development, perhaps some of its source code could be open-sourced for further engagement and development as the overall community is small.
- Text to speech.
- Speech to text.
- Translation APIs.
- Customizable keywords.
- Integration with 3rd party apps.
- Ease of deployment on the cloud.
- Although it takes time our apps powered by speech services gave us good ROI.
- Made our products stand out in finance, hr and operations functions.
- Gave much-needed AI-powered machine learning integration through NLP offered by azure.
- Our chat assistants became more user friendly and thus UX increased.
- Google Cloud Speech-to-Text, Amazon Transcribe and IBM Watson Speech to Text
Price is the number one factor which stands out for Azure among its competitor's Number of languages supported esp from an Indian context also is quite remarkable as opposed to its competitors, the vocabulary and accent support therein also matters. Its cloud-first deployment strategy also makes app deployment very easy.
Do you think Azure AI Speech delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Azure AI Speech's feature set?
Yes
Did Azure AI Speech live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Azure AI Speech go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Azure AI Speech again?
Yes
Evaluating Azure Cognitive Speech Services and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
Price. Being a relatively newer technology, speech services with additional features are expensive. Hence we found Azure Cognitive Speech Services at least in our budget. Us being office users also helped, relationship-wise.
We may evaluate more on our products integrating with product demos to save time instead of 3rd party products.
Relationship with Microsoft
Price
Support package.
APIs
Future version upgrades.
Support package.
APIs
Future version upgrades.
Be honest, take them through your vision and goals, be realistic and practical. Be very upfront about budgets and RoIs envisaged.
Comments
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