rhasspy VS larynx

I've been working on this for a few months now and I think I have it to a point where I am ready to share. This is definitely a very niche solution but I am creating a new skill handler for Grocy for the Open Source Voice Assistant Rhasspy (https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy). My handler is here: https://github.com/MCHellspawn/hermes-app-grocy. It is not complete yet but getting there. With is skill and a working Rhasspy 2.5 setup you can do a lot of tasks in Grocy with your voice. So far you can create and delete shopping lists, create products and add and remove them from shopping lists, list chores, mark them complete or skipped, and more.

It'll run on a cheap Ubuntu box if you can't get a Pi.

And lots of people seem to like Rhasspy too:

  https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy

Here is one example https://community.rhasspy.org/

I tried Amazon's Alexa, the top end model with a display. Often it would taunt you about new/interesting things on the screen, but I could never get them to work. I'd had to memorize things to get even the basics working. Ended up unplugging it.

However Google's Assistant in comparison worked great, no memorization, and very useful. Sure time, weather, set timers, and alarms worked great with a very flexible set of natural language queries. Even more complex things like what will be the temperature tomorrow at 10pm, simple calculations and unit conversions. But also things like IMDB like queries about directors, actors, which movies someone was in, etc generally worked well. It seemed to really understand things, not just "A web search returned ...". Even more complex things like the wheelbase of a 2004 WRX would return an answer, not a search result.

With all that said I'm looking for a non-cloud/on site solution, even if it requires more work, most recently noticed https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy

I just found this one: https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy

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