TTS VS espeak-ng

lol this marketing technique is getting very old. https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS is already amazing and open source.

Not sure how relevant this is but note that Coqui TTS (the realistic TTS) has already shut down

https://coqui.ai

I've used coqui.ai's TTS models[0] and library[1] to great success. I was able to get cloned voice to be rendered in about 80% of the audio clip length, and I believe you can also stream the response. Do note the model license for XTTS, it is one they wrote themselves that has some restrictions.

[0] https://huggingface.co/coqui/XTTS-v2

[1] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS

My only exposure to Coqui was their text to speech software. If I remember correctly the website was a commercialized service with TTS and probably some other related things. I hope the software work continues in the open.

https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS

Coqui.ai TTS (https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS)

"tts_models/multilingual/multi-dataset/xtts_v2" model from https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS. It gives pretty good results and works with references, so it's pretty easy to change the voice. By the way the source code of the project is open: https://github.com/volotat/Anagnorisis but be ready, the code is pretty raw for now.

A recent update to their GitHub also has a no-code gradio ui to facilitate fine-tuning and inferencing locally. https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS/releases/tag/v0.21.3

No API token found for 🐸Coqui Studio voices - https://coqui.ai

I think it would be good if they provided some samples on the readme. It would be good for example if their list of languages/accents could be sampled [1]

[1] https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/blob/master/docs/lang...

> eSpeak NG uses a "formant synthesis" method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings. It also supports Klatt formant synthesis, and the ability to use MBROLA as backend speech synthesizer.

I've been using eSpeak for many years now. It's superb for resource constrained systems.

I always wondered whether it would be possible to have a semi-context aware, but not neural network, approach.

I quite like the sound of Mimic 3, but it seems to be mostly abandoned: https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3

I'm skeptical about a senior JavaScript developer claiming to be bored. Nonetheless, let's see. How would you go about modifying [this](ng/blob/master/emscripten/espeakng_glue.idl) IDL file, this C++ glue code, and the relevant Make file to compile eSpeak NG to JavaScript with Emscripten with SSML support enabled?

eSpeak NG supports running on Linux, BSD, Mac, Android, Windows, has been compiled to WASM with Emscripten. See also espeak and meSpeak.js.

I may have a solution, BUT I'm at an airport right now, so... Perhaps tonight I can give you some ideas. There is a program I used to make a few presets for myself. https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/blob/master/docs/languages.md

For this one, I used espeak (https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng) as a text processor. It is almost 17 years old software and is pretty lacking, unfortunately. On the other hand, it's super fast and supports tens of languages. Long story short, punctuation introduces phrase break with a pause of fixed length, and capitalization is ignored.

I didnt not release trainy parts to build voices. I am considering, but there is so many packages already (coqui, espnet, piper, nemo, fairseq to name a few) that i focused on usability for now. Support for new languages is a different question. Everyone wants to train fancy neural nets. But support for new language is about writing rules and having language expertise. I did it for English (https://github.com/balacoon/en_us_normalization/tree/c1019cf878aa6baf25d6fff719cf418cca5a3107/production/classify). Doing it for all the other languages would probably take me a lifetime. Other speech synthesis solutions use 17-years old espeak for this purpose (https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng/blob/master/docs/languages.md). I introduced the fallback to it in Balacoon too. But generally, it is outdated technology and I believe we should do better.

espeak-ng works by first converting text to IPA and then pronouncing that. But im not sure im aware of a way to input arbitrary IPA, and also the quality is probably too low for you.

There are espeak-ng https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng and pocketsphinx https://github.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx which can be used locally without making external requests.

There are automatic tools to convert a written form of a language to IPA, I'm personally aware of espeak-ng, which supports* a lot of languages.

I've had good luck with https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng (for very specific purposes, and I was willing to wrangle IPA)