silero-models VS common-voice

I doubt it's currently actually "the best open source text to speech", but the answer I came up with when throwing a couple of hours at the problem some months ago was "Silero" [0, 1].

Following the "standalone" guide [2], it was pretty trivial to make the model render my sample text in about 100 English "voices" (many of which were similar to each other, and in varying quality). Sampling those, I got about 10 that were pretty "good". And maybe 6 that were the "best ones" (pretty natural, not annoying to listen to).

IIRC the license was free for noncommercial use only. I'm not sure exactly "how open source" they are, but it was simple to install the dependencies and write the basic Python to try it out; I had to write a for loop to try all the voices like I wanted. I ended using something else for the project for other reasons, but this could still be fairly good backup option for some use cases IMO.

  [0] https://github.com/snakers4/silero-models#text-to-speech

Glados was the first experiment. I moved on to silero afterwards: https://github.com/snakers4/silero-models

Some months ago I tried the Silero Models: https://github.com/snakers4/silero-models

With the audio sources I had, in English, the transcription had many mistakes. The good side is that installing and running the software worked as described in their documentation, so maybe it’s worth giving it a try by yourself.

Silero V3: fast high-quality text-to-speech in 20 languages with 173 voices\ (56 comments)

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.

A practical example: in the speech community, getting good results on datasets such as TIMITwould not be revolutionary, since it's super small and very old. On the contrary, things like Common Voice (which is constantly crowd-sourced) would be much more impactful. Just my two cents :)