Their user focus is shockingly poor.
I followed the link from the blog post that said "check out the demo on our product website". Then there's a big button that says "TRY IT FREE". Good, I say. That leads me through a signup process that involves credit cards and whatnot, and then dumps me out on what I guess is the equivalent of the AWS console, not some nice audio test page.
So then I root around in the console, finally find the text to speech stuff, and screw around with various interfaces. None of them seems to be the right thing. Eventually I decide I must have missed something, go back to the product website, and scroll down further to find the "convert your speech to text right now". Great, say I.
The blog post explicitly talks about video. I want to see if it can transcribe a talk I did, so I tried uploading a file; nothing appears to happen on Firefox. I try a couple more times. I sigh heavily and switch to Chrome.
It does appear to work on Chrome, but it's entirely infuriating. I tried uploading a video file, which was over 50MB, so it refused. I then figured out how to extract the audio alone and uploaded that, at which point it complained it was over a minute. Then I find another incantation to chop my audio to a minute (which they just should have done for me, and which anyway should be explained in the interface).
Finally, I upload 60 seconds of audio. And nothing fucking happens. After all that, the thing just doesn't doesn't work. No error messages, no anything.
This is my first impression of the Google Cloud Platform, and all I hear is the squeaking of clown shoes. I'm sure the rest of it can't be this bad, but if they can't make a simple demo work, I'm unlikely to find out.
I followed the link from the blog post that said "check out the demo on our product website". Then there's a big button that says "TRY IT FREE". Good, I say. That leads me through a signup process that involves credit cards and whatnot, and then dumps me out on what I guess is the equivalent of the AWS console, not some nice audio test page.
So then I root around in the console, finally find the text to speech stuff, and screw around with various interfaces. None of them seems to be the right thing. Eventually I decide I must have missed something, go back to the product website, and scroll down further to find the "convert your speech to text right now". Great, say I.
The blog post explicitly talks about video. I want to see if it can transcribe a talk I did, so I tried uploading a file; nothing appears to happen on Firefox. I try a couple more times. I sigh heavily and switch to Chrome.
It does appear to work on Chrome, but it's entirely infuriating. I tried uploading a video file, which was over 50MB, so it refused. I then figured out how to extract the audio alone and uploaded that, at which point it complained it was over a minute. Then I find another incantation to chop my audio to a minute (which they just should have done for me, and which anyway should be explained in the interface).
Finally, I upload 60 seconds of audio. And nothing fucking happens. After all that, the thing just doesn't doesn't work. No error messages, no anything.
This is my first impression of the Google Cloud Platform, and all I hear is the squeaking of clown shoes. I'm sure the rest of it can't be this bad, but if they can't make a simple demo work, I'm unlikely to find out.