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Our new public speech synthesis in super-high quality, 10x faster and more stable

Reading time 3 min
Views 4.1K

hero_image


In our last article we made a bunch of promises about our speech synthesis.


After a lot of hard work we finally have delivered upon these promises:


  • Model size reduced 2x;
  • New models are 10x faster;
  • We added flags to control stress;
  • Now the models can make proper pauses;
  • High quality voice added (and unlimited "random" voices);
  • All speakers squeezed into the same model;
  • Input length limitations lifted, now models can work with paragraphs of text;
  • Pauses, speed and pitch can be controlled via SSML;
  • Sampling rates of 8, 24 or 48 kHz are supported;
  • Models are much more stable — they do not omit words anymore;

This is a truly break-through achievement for us and we are not planning to stop anytime soon. We will be adding as many languages as possible shortly (the CIS languages, English, European languages, Hindic languages). Also we are still planning to make our models additional 2-5x faster.


We are also planning to add phonemes and a new model for stress, as well as to reduce the minimum amount of audio required to train a high-quality voice to 5 — 15 minutes.


As usual you can try our model in our repo or in colab.

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Total votes 13: ↑13 and ↓0 +13
Comments 0

An Unexpected Article About Our Unicorn: Who Is the PVS-Studio Mascot?

Reading time 5 min
Views 1.9K

PVS-Studio has a mascot that became inseparable from the brand - a unicorn. Lately we've been getting many questions about our magic steed: why the unicorn, why has he changed so much, does he have hooves, how come he doesn't wear pants, and how do we draw him. The answers are finally here, in this very article.

Attention: there will be a lot of pictures. And I mean A LOT.

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Total votes 11: ↑11 and ↓0 +11
Comments 0

Giving a presentation with perfect UI/UX design

Reading time 4 min
Views 5.5K

Introduction




Every single one of us gives presentations from time to time. What can be difficult about creating a couple of slides with great UI and nice content, right? Well… not really actually. In real life, things may get difficult.


You want to cover the whole topic and give as much information as fits on a slide. Then you go to Google to find some awesome pictures, and finally, cover it all with some fancy animation. And here is where things start falling apart: how do you balance all this stuff?


Take our helping hand, as we are here to show you how to create a presentation with both perfect user experience and user interface. Let's find out how to create perfect UI & UX design in a presentation.

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Total votes 20: ↑18 and ↓2 +16
Comments 2

Dobroshrift

Reading time 2 min
Views 2.4K
What one gets easily and for free can be a real struggle for others — these are the thoughts every letter of the «Dobroshrift» [Kindness Font] evolves. It was developed for the World Cerebral Palsy Day with the participation of children with this diagnosis. So we decided to take part in this charity action and changed the website logo till the end of the day.


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Total votes 17: ↑17 and ↓0 +17
Comments 0

Make it easier to get finished: Interview with John Romero, developer of Doom

Reading time 12 min
Views 5.8K
At the last Tech Train IT festival, we met the legendary John Romero, who designed and developed the iconic Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. We talked about whether game developers need soft skills, which working tools to pay attention to, and which co-founder of Id Software's favorite toys are. Questions were asked by Nikita Tsaplin, the founder of RUVDS.


→ Text and video in Russian
Total votes 26: ↑25 and ↓1 +24
Comments 0

How to get the team to search for more productive ideas

Reading time 4 min
Views 1.7K
The creation of design models as well as visualization of solutions is for some reason always a subject of great interest among all members of a productive team, be it a manager eager to master Sketch, or a developer who wants to make cool interfaces without the need to go to a designer. But we all know what happens when it comes to actually doing stuff.



My way


Hi, everybody!

My name is Anna and I work for an American company Scentbird NY as a product designer. Prior to that I was involved in developing flagship products in Alfa-Bank design team.

I was probably born under a lucky star but all my life I've been working with the developers who suggest the best product solutions, better than a lot of product managers and product owners. But anyway, my observation is that the earlier you involve developers into working on a particular task, the better off you are.

What you are about to read is actually a blueprint on how to conduct brainstorm sessions and generate not-so-obvious yet effective solutions, which are apparently really easy to reach and not that time-consuming.
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Total votes 14: ↑14 and ↓0 +14
Comments 4

Top 5 mobile app development companies in the UK

Reading time 3 min
Views 2.3K
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According to Evans Data Corporation, there are 12 million developers in the world. About 350,000 of these software and mobile developers work and live in the UK including freelancers and IT employees.

How do you choose the best one among all this variety? The obvious answer — get going with a professional IT company. This will increase your chances to work with true professionals.

I’ve made my own research based on a variety of reliable resources like Google SERPs and user’s reviews, different independent media, including medium.com and aggregators, like businessofapps.com, Clutch, etc. and other independent sites. Based on the collected data, I’ve aggregated the total score for each of the 25 leaders, and here I represent a list of the winners: the top 5 software developers in the UK.
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Total votes 12: ↑12 and ↓0 +12
Comments 1

Making games is [not] hard. Looking back at small mobile project on Unity3D

Reading time 11 min
Views 2.4K
When you have an idea of a new game mechanic, or even flash of interesting concept — soon you'll be obsessed about it with an immense urge to start doing something already. Sometimes you write such ideas down somewhere and bring them a chance to ignite full development cycle later. But I've stumbled upon the opposite action. My current game became this giant monster eating finance and time, and grown much bigger than I ever thought. So, I've needed to put it back for a while. But I could not sit without game development, and in my free time I've started to work on my new project! Plus that one was quite different from the previous ones, because I've decided to target mobile. If you are interested in how this project was done, from a small idea to the final release, then let's dive into it!


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Total votes 17: ↑15 and ↓2 +13
Comments 0

How to create a dark theme without breaking things: learning with the Yandex Mail team

Reading time 8 min
Views 8.5K


My name is Vladimir, and I develop mobile front-end for Yandex Mail. Our apps have had a dark theme for a while, but it was incomplete: only the interface and plain emails were dark. Messages with custom formatting remained light and stood out against the dark interface, hurting our users’ eyes at night.


Today I'll tell you how we fixed this problem. You will learn about two simple techniques that didn't work for us and the method that finally did the trick — adaptive page recoloring. I'll also share some ideas about adapting images to a dark theme. To be fair, darkening pages with custom CSS is a rather peculiar task, but I believe some of you may find our experience helpful.

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Total votes 22: ↑20 and ↓2 +18
Comments 1

Top mobile app development companies

Reading time 53 min
Views 8.6K
Looking for an app development company? I’ve searched for information about it and made this list. It might help to find an app development company to hire. The list contains basic information about each company included in it like company size, hourly rate, min. project size, etc. And I recently decided to upgrade the list to 100 app development companies.
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Total votes 23: ↑18 and ↓5 +13
Comments 2

Details

Reading time 6 min
Views 952
How often do you get to 404 pages? Usually, they are not styled and stay default. Recently I’ve found test.do.am which interactive character attracts attention and livens up the error page.

Probably, there was just a cat picture, then they thought up eyes movement and developer implemented the idea.imageNow user visits the page and checks out the effect. It’s cool and pleasant small feature, it catches, then user discusses it with colleagues or friends and even repeats the feature. It could be this easy, if not:
Total votes 14: ↑13 and ↓1 +12
Comments 0

My and my girlfriend’s first video game. Development with Unity. Part 1

Reading time 7 min
Views 5.4K
If not to take into account releases for Android and a dozen of abandoned projects just before they were ready, then yes, it is our first game appropriate for more than one platform. How did it all start? Very simply. We worked on another project, let’s call it “project A”, and we’d been working on it for a long time when we decided to make a game during a couple of months and use it to train our marketing skills, and then immediately release our “project A” when we would be more experienced in the promotion of games. But the plan failed and “project A” was kept untouched for the whole year. But this story isn’t about “project A”, it’s about a logical game called «Cubicity: Slide puzzle».


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Total votes 17: ↑16 and ↓1 +15
Comments 5

Levelord, an Ordinary Moscow Resident: Interview with the Creator of Duke Nukem

Reading time 20 min
Views 6.1K
RUVDS together with Habr.com continues the series of interviews with interesting people in computer field. Previously we met Boris Yangel, who heads AI development of Yandex’s Alice voice assistant.

Today we bring you an interview with Richard (Levelord) Gray — level designer of such legendary games as Duke Nukem, American McGee Alice, Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2, SiN, and Serious Sam. And he is the one who coined the famous phrase «You are not supposed to be here». Richard was born and spent most of his life in USA, but several years ago he moved to Moscow to his russian wife and daughter.

These who speak to Richard are Nick Zemlyanskiy, editor of Habr.com, and Nikita Tsaplin, co-founder and managing partner of RUVDS company.


→ Text and video in Russian
Total votes 31: ↑30 and ↓1 +29
Comments 11

Generating multi-brand multi-platform icons with Sketch and a Node.js script — Part #1

Reading time 10 min
Views 2.2K


TL;DR


Using a custom build script in Node JS, it is possible to manipulate a series of Sketch files, and then, using an internal Sketch tool, automatically export their assets, to generate multiple icon libraries, for multiple platforms and different brands, that support dynamic colourisation of the assets via design tokens, and also AB testing of the assets via naming convention. Easy peasy :)


Well, actually it’s not that easy, but it can certainly be done. This post is a detailed explanation of how we did it, and what we discovered along the way.

The problem we were trying to solve


At Badoo we build a dating app. Actually, multiple dating apps. For multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Mobile Web, Desktop Web), across multiple teams.

We use hundreds of icons in our apps. Some of them are the same across different apps, some are very specific to the brands the apps reflect. The icons are continuously evolving, in sync with the evolution of the design. Sometimes completely new icons are added, while others get updated, and still others get dropped (although, they often remain in the codebase).
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Total votes 30: ↑29 and ↓1 +28
Comments 0

We're in UltraHD Morty! How to watch any movie in 4K

Reading time 3 min
Views 14K
You’ve probably heard about Yandex’s DeepHD technology they once used to improve the quality of old Soviet cartoons. Unfortunately, it’s not public yet, and we, regular programmers, don’t have the dedication to write our own solution. But I personally really wanted to watch Rick and Morty on my 2880x1880 Retina display. And I was deeply disappointed, as even 1080p video (the highest available for this series) looks really blurry on a Retina display! Don’t get me wrong, 1080p is often good enough, but Retina is designed in such a way that an animation with its pronounced outlines in 1080p looks awfully blurry, like 480p on a FullHD monitor.

I decided I want to see Rick and Morty in 4K, even though I can’t write neural networks. And, amazingly, I found a solution. You don’t even need to write any code: all you need is around 100GB of free space and a bit of patience. The result is a sharp 4K image that looks better than any interpolation.


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Total votes 21: ↑19 and ↓2 +17
Comments 7

The story of how we changed the PVS-Studio icon

Reading time 5 min
Views 1.1K



The 7.0 release marked a new milestone in the history of the PVS-Studio analyzer — the analysis is now available not only for the code, written in C, C++, C#, but also in Java. In addition to this global improvement, some existing mechanisms for the analysis are refined and improved, diagnostic rules are added. There was another significant change that you could hardly missed. We changed the icon.

Note. In the article, you will not find cunning tricks or tips on designing icons. The purpose of the article is a bit different this time — it is to tell a story, and, if possible, make it interesting.
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Total votes 35: ↑33 and ↓2 +31
Comments 0

Implementing UI in iOS: Better, faster, and it scales

Reading time 10 min
Views 4.3K


A few months ago I came across a very interesting documentary series on Netflix called Abstract, they basically explore the output of professional designers from different sectors like architecture, graphic design, fashion, … in their workplaces.

It was easy to spot some similarities in the work of designers from other fields with that of an iOS developer who implements user interfaces. For example, when a designer is creating something that is big enough to be broken down into smaller parts, using a strategy like ‘Divide and Conquer’ is key to being able to focus on smaller parts that will be assembled at later stages in the process.

Breaking down a whole design into smaller subunits allows us to think about each problem in isolation, removing any dependencies between the components. But the full picture also needs to be present throughout the whole process, otherwise there can be problems when the time comes to fit everything back together.

On the other hand, while watching Abstract I noticed that in the design process for objects like a shoes, banners or buildings the final design remains fixed for the lifetime of the product. The design of a Nike shoe isn’t going to change after it is released and there aren’t going to be any updates once it’s on the shelf in the shop. Sometimes a design remains unchanged even 20 years later, and the product is still sound.
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Total votes 28: ↑27 and ↓1 +26
Comments 1

Server-provided animations in iOS apps

Reading time 5 min
Views 2.7K


Hi everyone! About six months ago we launched one of Badoo’s most exciting features: Live Streaming. One of its main functionalities is that viewers can send gifts to their favourite streamers to express their appreciation. We wanted to make the gifts as fancy and as engaging as possible, so it was decided to make some of them really lively, and by this I mean animated. And to engage people even more, we, the Badoo team, planned to update those gifts and animations every few weeks.

As an iOS engineer, you might have already guessed the challenge we faced here: the need to add new animations and remove the old ones was going to require a fair amount of work from the client side. We’d need both the Android and the iOS development teams for every release — which, when combined with the amount of time App Store reviews and approval often take, would mean it might be days before each update could go live. But we solved the problem, and I’m going to explain to you how.

Solution overview


By this stage, we already knew how to export Adobe After Effects (AAE) animations into the format readable by our iOS app using the Lottie library. This time though, we went a bit further: we decided to create a kind of animation storage service, available via the internet. In other words, we would store all the actual animations on the server and deliver them to the client apps on demand:
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Total votes 33: ↑32 and ↓1 +31
Comments 1

Manifest of Smart Home Developer: 15 principles

Reading time 12 min
Views 4K
Today I’d like to speak about Smart homes and IoT devices. But it is no ordinary article. You won’t find description of hardware, links to manufacturers, batches of code or repositories. Today we’ll discuss something of a higher level — principles that are used to organize “smart” systems.

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Smart home is a system that can do some everyday routines instead of a person. It leads us to the first and the main principle:
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Total votes 29: ↑27 and ↓2 +25
Comments 1

A small notebook for a system administrator

Reading time 21 min
Views 161K
I am a system administrator, and I need a small, lightweight notebook for every day carrying. Of course, not just to carry it, but for use it to work.

I already have a ThinkPad x200, but it’s heavier than I would like. And among the lightweight notebooks, I did not find anything suitable. All of them imitate the MacBook Air: thin, shiny, glamorous, and they all critically lack ports. Such notebook is suitable for posting photos on Instagram, but not for work. At least not for mine.

After not finding anything suitable, I thought about how a notebook would turn out if it were developed not with design, but the needs of real users in mind. System administrators, for example. Or people serving telecommunications equipment in hard-to-reach places — on roofs, masts, in the woods, literally in the middle of nowhere.

The results of my thoughts are presented in this article.

Figure to attract attention
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Total votes 91: ↑88 and ↓3 +85
Comments 57
1