common-voice VS TTS

Yeah there's no chance Mozilla would do anything like this:

https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/

Mozillas Common Voice Project (https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/) is creating an open dataset for many minority languages to make it easier to support them in STT systems. If you speak one of these languages please consider donating a few minutes of your voice.

> it was not at all obvious to me there was some way of speeding up getting a language in the first place.

Yeah, that's the biggest failing of Common Voice in my opinion. Getting a new language up to speed could be much improved by simply adding a few links to documentation, but even the existing links are broken, which I reported in March 2022... https://github.com/common-voice/common-voice/issues/3637

> I have no interest in wasting time contributing to a UI translation I actively don't want to be subjected to

Translating the UI may still help you get other people to record, even if you don't want to use it yourself.

> I'll see if I can submit some sentences at least

If you want to go faster, there's also a project to extract sentences from Wikipedia etc. in small doses Mozilla's lawyers and Wikimedia's lawyers have agreed are fair use. I think you'd only need to define how Norwegian Bokmål separates sentences. (E.g. after a period but not if it's a common abbreviation like "etc." in the preceding sentence.)

There is a lot of TTS and SST development going on (https://github.com/mozilla/TTS; https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech; https://github.com/common-voice/common-voice). That is the only way they work: Contributions from the wild.

Since you're interested in STT and TTS, let me just plug in Mozilla's Common Voice, a way for everyone to contribute to an open source data set for STT. You can record yourself or verify other people's recordings!

[커먼보이스 전자우편](mailto:[email protected]) || Common Voice || Korean Language Homepage || FAQs || Speaking Aloud and Reviewing Recordings || Sentence Collector || NVidia/NeMo

How can it be used for transcription?

In their website I only see an interface for either uploading audio or submitting transcriptions:

https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/es

The Github repo they mention (https://github.com/common-voice/common-voice) seems to be just that sample collection software. I do not see where I can download the software to transcribe audio.

2. Coqui AI

That is probably the reason you can't find that much.

*https://coqui.ai/

It's really easy for a technical person to do as well.

I use Coqui TTS[0] as part of my home automation, I wrote a small python script that lets me upload a voice clip for it to clone after I got the idea from HeyWillow[1], and a small shim that lets me send the output to a Home Assistant media player instead of using their standard output device. I run the TTS container on a VM with a Tesla P4 (~£100 to buy) and get about 1x-2x (roughly the same time it'd take to say it, to process) using the large model.

Just for a giggle, I uploaded a few 3s-5s second clip of myself speaking and cloned my voice, then executed a command to our living room media player to call my wife into the room; from another room, she was 100% convinced it was myself speaking words I'd never spoken.

I tried playing with a variety of sentences for a few hours and overall, it sounded almost exactly like me, to me, with the exception of some "attitude" and "intonation" I know I wouldn't use in my speech. I didn't notice much of an improvement using much longer clips; the short ones were "good enough".

Tangentially, it really bugs me that most phone providers in the UK insist you record a "personal greeting" now before they'll let you check your voice mail box, I just record silence, because the last thing I want/need is a voicemail greeting in my voice confirming to some randomer I didn't want calling me, who I am and that my number is active, even more so knowing how I can

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

For anyone who is interested, CoquiTTS (formerly, MozillaTTS) was great, but the project isn't maintained anymore (athough there's been some confusion about whether or not it's active. See: https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS/issues/4022).

Looks like there's an effort to keep an actively maintained fork here, though: https://github.com/idiap/coqui-ai-TTS

I am super impressed by the quality of voice cloning offered by Eleven Labs and Play.ai. I feel like I see impressive OSS demos on social frequently, but last weekend I took a few popular ones for a spin and quality wasn't even close to the proprietary models.

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

The license is the MPL, which allows commercial use?

https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS/blob/dev/LICENSE.txt

When I did a similar thing (but with less LLM) I liked https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS but back then I needed to cut out the conversion step from tensor to a list of numbers to make it work really nicely.

I just noticed that https://coqui.ai/ is "Shutting down".

I'm building a web app (React / Django) which takes a list of affirmations & goals (in Markdown files), puts them into a database (SQlite), and uses voice synthesis to create voice audio files of the phrases. These are combined with a relaxed backing track (ffmpeg), made into playlists of 10-20 phrases (randomly sampled, or according to a theme: "mind" "body" "soul") and then play automatically in the morning & evening (cron). This allows you to persistently hear & vocalize your own goals & good vibes over time.

I had been planning to use Coqui TTS as the local text-to-speech engine, but with this cancellation, I'd love to hear from the community what is a great open-source, local text-to-speech engine?

Generally, I learn both the highest quality commercially available technology (example: ElevenLabs), and also the best open-source equivalent. Would love to hear suggestions & perspectives on this. What voice synth tools are you investing your time into learning & building with?

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