Google integrates Chirp 3 voice model into Vertex AI

Generative AI has largely been about text-based interfaces for creating text, images, and more. But now, voice is stepping into the spotlight, and it's coming on strong. Google just dropped some big news: starting next week, they're rolling out Chirp 3 — their latest speech-to-text and HD text-to-speech models — on their Vertex AI platform.

Just last week, Google kinda snuck in an announcement that Chirp 3 would introduce eight new voices across 31 languages. This tech is perfect for building voice assistants, whipping up audiobooks, and even creating support agents and voice-overs for videos. They shared this at an event at Google’s DeepMind offices in London.

Google's not the only one jumping on the voice AI bandwagon. Last week, Sesame, the folks behind the super-realistic AI voices "Maya" and "Miles," announced they're letting developers build their own custom apps and services using their tech.

Google's trying to keep things in check with Chirp 3 by putting some usage restrictions in place to prevent misuse. "We're just working through some of these things with our safety team," said Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google Cloud, at a news event today.

ElevenLabs is another big player in the AI voice game, having raked in millions to grow their voice services.

With Chirp 3, Google's bringing it into the same family as their latest versions of the LLM Gemini, which are still in testing, along with their image-generation model Imagen and the pricey Veo 2 video generation tool.

It's still up in the air whether Chirp 3 will sound as "real" as some other AI voices out there (Sesame's work is pretty impressive). But as Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, pointed out, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

"In the near term ... this idea that [AI is] a silver bullet to everything in the next couple of years, I don’t see that happening just yet. I think we’re still quite a few years away from something like AGI happening," he said. "It’s going to change things ... over the next decade, so the medium to longer term. It’s one of those interesting moments in time."

Google kicked off Vertex AI back in 2021 as a spot for developers to build machine learning services in the cloud. That was way before AI, and especially generative AI, became the hot topic it is now, thanks to OpenAI’s GPT services.

Since then, Google's been pushing Vertex AI hard, trying to keep up with the likes of Microsoft and Amazon, who are also building generative AI tools for developers. With Vertex AI, developers can not only build on top of Gemini but also classify data, train models, and get them ready for production. It'll be interesting to see if Google decides to open up their garden to models from other creators.

Google's been at this "Chirp" voice thing for years, starting way back when they used it as a code name to take on Amazon's Alexa.