Google Cloud on James Montgomery

Duel stack life - exchanging momentum for speed

Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

TL; DR

I knew duel stacking this site would introduce some challenges. In this case, I found myself chasing speed demons at the expense of a focus on other project time. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it - however, there’s a lesson in there.

Multi-cloud thoughts

This site is a project which began on the one hand as a reason to explore the GCP Firebase hosting product. Extending it to AWS has added a dimension to it whilst still being relevant to the project itself.

TTS project update 1 - adding texture to my generated speech

Thu, 14 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

TL; DR

In this post, I’d like to share an update on work to address some of the limitations in my text to speech project for Elite Dangerous.. Namely:

Single voice is used for the synthesis; and
Pitch, tone and emphasis are unchanged from defaults.

If you’d like to see the result of the work so far, here is a brief overview video, I’ll describe how we got here below:

Google Firebase with a side of AWS Amplify

Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

TL; DR

In this post, I’ll discuss a rabbit hole that I went down with only a thin excuse as the reason. And here it is, a Reddit reply to a shared post from this site:

I can’t view on my desktop because your site is blocked on my network. Sorry

The rabbit hole in question? Dual stacking this site across Google and Amazon infrastructure.

Introducing AWS Amplify

I first read about Amplify in this blog post. It discussed the launch of Amplify Console as an evolution of the framework that proceeded it into a service offering. Described as:

Google Cloud Text-to-Speech with PowerShell

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

TL; DR

In this post, I’ll walk through the basics of using PowerShell to interact with the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API. Partly a documentation exercise and somewhat a guide I’d like to have been able to read when I started on my Elite Dangerous Google Cloud Text-to-Speech project.

As such, we’ll start with a basic script to produce an audio file and explain how that works. Later I’ll walk through some parameters of interest to affect the response. Lastly, I’ll introduce how we can use SSML for a variation in response.