TensorFlowTTS VS tortoise-tts

Hey HN, has anyone found a viable solution for doing this locally and offline on iOS? I'd like to offer a privacy-friendly text to speech feature to my App, and Apple's speech synthesis sounds awful compared to some newer models and TTS engines. The only thing I've found is an older TensorflowTTS example here: https://github.com/TensorSpeech/TensorFlowTTS/tree/master/examples/ios

Any pointers or tips appreciated.

I had a lot of success using [FastSpeech2 + MB MelGAN via TensorFlowTTS](https://github.com/TensorSpeech/TensorFlowTTS). There are demos for [iOS](https://github.com/TensorSpeech/TensorFlowTTS/tree/master/ex...) and [Android](https://github.com/TensorSpeech/TensorFlowTTS/tree/master/ex...) which will allow you to run pretty convincing, modern TTS models with only a few hundred milliseconds of processing latency.

I need an example of how I would go about it. I've combed through examples but it's just not clicking for me.

https://github.com/TensorSpeech/TensorFlowTTS was the project. It was pretty much a direct compile and run. I went through and added the required features to enable it as TTS service for Android. I also moved the Tensorflow portion into a separate thread from the TTS service directly, since Android restricts it's TTS service to a single thread, and the Tensorflow service uses five threads to run at a good speed. It's a much much heavier solution than a C/C++ compiled library, but it works out of the box and I will worry about optimizations later

You need to try, it implements most advanced algorithms and not as ad-hoc as nvidia https://github.com/TensorSpeech/TensorFlowTTS

For open source offline TTS with more or less recent algorithms you can check

https://github.com/TensorSpeech/TensorFlowTTS

The quality also depends on the type of model. I'm not really sure what ESpeak-ng actually uses? The classical TTS approaches often use some statistical model (e.g. HMM) + some vocoder. You can get to intelligible speech pretty easily but the quality is bad (w.r.t. how natural it sounds).

There are better open source TTS models. E.g. check https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts or https://github.com/NVIDIA/tacotron2. Or here for more: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/12kjof5/d_...

I use Tortoise TTS. It's slow, a little clunky, and sometimes the output gets downright weird. But it's the best quality-oriented TTS I've found that I can run locally.

https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts

neonbjb/tortoise-tts

EDIT: It appears to be the exact same issue as this

It was primarily being used to train TTS models (see https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts), which largely fit into a single GPUs memory. So, for data parallelism, x8 PCIe isn't that much of a concern.

Previously TortoiseTTS was associated with PlayHT in some way, although the exact connection is a bit vague [0].

From the descriptions here it sounds a lot like AudioLM / SPEAR TTS / some of Meta's recent multilingual TTS approaches, although those models are not open source, sounds like PlayHT's approach is in a similar spirit. The discussion of "mel tokens" is closer to what I would call the classic TTS pipeline in many ways... PlayHT has generally been kind of closed about what they used, would be interesting to know more.

I assume the key factor here is high quality, emotive audio with good data cleaning processes. Probably not even a lot of data, at least in the scale of "a lot" in speech, e.g. ASR (millions of hours) or TTS (hundreds to thousands). As opposed to some radically new architectural piece never before seen in the literature, there are lots of really nice tools for emotive and expressive TTS buried in recent years of publications.

Tacotron 2 is perfectly capable of this type of stuff as well, as shown by Dessa [1] a few years ago (this writeup is a nice intro to TTS concepts). With the limit largely being, at some point you haven't heard certain phonetic sounds before in a voice, and need to do something to get plausible outcomes for new voices.

[0] Discussion here https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts/issues/182#issuecomm...

[1] https://medium.com/dessa-news/realtalk-how-it-works-94c1afda...

Tortoise GitHub repo - Source code, documentation, and usage guide