mycroft-core VS TTS

It's indeed suspicious. You're sending your voice samples, your various services accounts, your location and more private data to some proprietary black box in some public cloud. Sorry, but this is a privacy nightmare. It should be open source and self-hosted like Mycroft (https://mycroft.ai) or Leon (https://getleon.ai) to be trustworthy.

But I would recommend writing some proper glue logic in Python and use the socket function for communication. But if you really want to get rid of Alexa, it's probably worth it to set up mycroft.ai or another open source assistant.

https://mycroft.ai/ is a sophisticated open source replacement for Siri/Alexa … you can buy their premade hardware version for $399

This project reminds me of MyCroft https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-core.

I haven't looked at it recently, but the Mycroft AI virtual assistant project is based on FOSS, self-contained software. I used to have it running on a spare laptop at home. It might be suitable for self-hosted AI experimentation.

The AI I'm interested in is of this sort https://mycroft.ai/ i.e. where I run and control it locally.

I don't want to go on any more "journeys" with Google. The last one start with me rooting for and trusting them (circa IPO.. 2004?) and ended with a dystopian nightmare spy apparatus and abuses like AMP.

But OG Mycroft can also be installed: https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-core

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)

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

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

If you're looking at open source models, you'll be able to improve on things, but it'll likely not be quite as polished as paid for services and you'll have to host it yourself. If you want to add sentiment extraction and prosody you need to be (likely) building your own TTS system from the ground up. In which case I'd be looking at fine-tuning Mozilla TTS or working from even lower level and peeking at Kaldi.

Nice! And it has 5M free tier characters! How does it compare to open source libraries like: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS?

I have heard good things about Mozilla's TTS: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS