larynx VS TTS

The most exciting thing about Home Assistant's "Year of the Voice", for me, is that it is apparently enabling/supporting @synesthesiam's continued phenomenal contributions to the FLOSS off-line voice synthesis space.

The quality, variety & diversity of voices that synesthesiam's "Larynx" TTS project (https://github.com/rhasspy/larynx/) made available, completely transformed the Free/Open Source Text To Speech landscape.

In addition "OpenTTS" (https://github.com/synesthesiam/opentts) provided a common API for interacting with multiple FLOSS TTS projects which showed great promise for actually enabling "standing on the shoulders of" rather than re-inventing the same basic functionality every time.

The new "Piper" TTS project mentioned in the article is the apparent successor to Larynx and, along with the accompanying LibriTTS/LibriVox-based voice models, brings to FLOSS TTS something it's never had before:

* Too many voices! :)

Seriously, the current LibriTTS voice model version has 900+ voices (of varying quality levels), how do you even navigate that many?![0]

And that's not even considering the even higher quality single speaker models based on other audio recording sources.

Offline TTS while immensely valuable for individuals, doesn't seem to be attractive domain for most commercial entities due to lack of lock-in/telemetry opportunities so I was concerned that we might end up missing out on further valuable contributions from synesthesiam's specialised skills & experience due to financial realities & the human need for food. :)

I'm glad we instead get to see what happens next.

[0] See my follow-up comment about this.

Larynx!

I've had good results with https://github.com/rhasspy/larynx

Larynx is a really good text-to-speech engine

I was able to install 3.7 following this guide. https://github.com/rhasspy/larynx/issues/9

If you've not already encountered them I'd definitely encourage you to check out these Free/Open Source projects too:

* Larynx: https://github.com/rhasspy/larynx/

* OpenTTS: https://github.com/synesthesiam/opentts

* Likely Mimic3 in the near future: https://mycroft.ai/blog/mimic-3-preview/

Larynx in particular has a focus on "faster than real-time" while OpenTTS is an attempt to package & provide common REST API to all Free/Open Source Text To Speech systems so the FLOSS ecosystem can build on previous work supported by short-lived business interests, rather than start from scratch every time.

AIUI the developer of the first two projects now works for Mycroft AI & is involved in the development of Mimic3 which seems very promising given how much of an impact on quality his solo work has had in just the past couple of years or so.

I haven't used it on it's own, but Larynx has worked well for me for Rhasspy

Fast or good, choose one

Mozilla's TTS is a python package installable with pip and uses cpu or gpu resources to render a choice of voices, they mostly sound natural and this is the good. https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

Mycroft's mimic3 is the default voice renderer for the Mycroft project that runs on pi hardware and sounds ok-ish, that is the fast. https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3

There are many others but these are the two I use according to if it needs to run on limited hardware or if the cycles fall freely from the sky.

Coqui-ai was a commercial continuation of Mozilla TTS and STT (https://github.com/mozilla/TTS).

At the time (2018-ish), it was really impressive for on-device voice synthesis (with a quality approaching the Google and Azure cloud-based voice synthesis options) and open source, so a lot of people in the FOSS community were hoping it could be used for a privacy-respecting home assistant, Linux speech synthesis that doesn't suck, etc.

After Mozilla abandoned the project, Coqui continued development and had some really impressive one-shot voice cloning, but pivoted to marketing speech synthesis for game developers. They were probably having trouble monetizing it, and it doesn't surprise me that they shut down.

An equivalent project that's still in active development and doing really well is Piper TTS (https://github.com/rhasspy/piper).

An RSS reader that integrates TTS (or TTS)

My solution would be to use a speech synthesis library, maybe eSpeak or Festival, just for ease of use; I think they each provide a library that you could use from C or C++ easily. This one from Mozilla is a more modern system with better-quality output, but it looks like it's set up to run through Python, and I haven't looked at it closely enough to see how much work it would be to get it working for you.

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.

unfortunately not yet. I need to expand the library of languages and voices. looking around, it seems only Coqui had some traction re Brazilian Portuguese: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS/issues/160. If you foresee wide adoption of the tech for this locale, hit me up with DM

I haven't used it, but there's also mozilla/TTS.

Mozilla TTS

Instead, just use Firefox's open-source TTS model: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS