tortoise-tts VS bark

The quality also depends on the type of model. I'm not really sure what ESpeak-ng actually uses? The classical TTS approaches often use some statistical model (e.g. HMM) + some vocoder. You can get to intelligible speech pretty easily but the quality is bad (w.r.t. how natural it sounds).

There are better open source TTS models. E.g. check https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts or https://github.com/NVIDIA/tacotron2. Or here for more: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/12kjof5/d_...

I use Tortoise TTS. It's slow, a little clunky, and sometimes the output gets downright weird. But it's the best quality-oriented TTS I've found that I can run locally.

https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts

neonbjb/tortoise-tts

EDIT: It appears to be the exact same issue as this

It was primarily being used to train TTS models (see https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts), which largely fit into a single GPUs memory. So, for data parallelism, x8 PCIe isn't that much of a concern.

Previously TortoiseTTS was associated with PlayHT in some way, although the exact connection is a bit vague [0].

From the descriptions here it sounds a lot like AudioLM / SPEAR TTS / some of Meta's recent multilingual TTS approaches, although those models are not open source, sounds like PlayHT's approach is in a similar spirit. The discussion of "mel tokens" is closer to what I would call the classic TTS pipeline in many ways... PlayHT has generally been kind of closed about what they used, would be interesting to know more.

I assume the key factor here is high quality, emotive audio with good data cleaning processes. Probably not even a lot of data, at least in the scale of "a lot" in speech, e.g. ASR (millions of hours) or TTS (hundreds to thousands). As opposed to some radically new architectural piece never before seen in the literature, there are lots of really nice tools for emotive and expressive TTS buried in recent years of publications.

Tacotron 2 is perfectly capable of this type of stuff as well, as shown by Dessa [1] a few years ago (this writeup is a nice intro to TTS concepts). With the limit largely being, at some point you haven't heard certain phonetic sounds before in a voice, and need to do something to get plausible outcomes for new voices.

[0] Discussion here https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts/issues/182#issuecomm...

[1] https://medium.com/dessa-news/realtalk-how-it-works-94c1afda...

Tortoise GitHub repo - Source code, documentation, and usage guide

!pip install git+https://github.com/suno-ai/bark.git

To my knowledge, the model being used for this is "chirp" which is 'based on' bark[1], an AI text to speech model.

The github page for bark links to a page about chirp, which returns a 404 page for me [2]. that the model for suno.ai's song generator isn't too much different than the text to speech model.

My hunch is that it was something like a coincidence that the bark model was capable of producing music, and that was spun off into this product. Unfortunately, there seems to still be issues with bark when generating long (like book length) spoken audio. Which is too bad, as someone who's worked jobs that require lots of driving, it would be awesome to be able to have any text read to me in a natural sounding voice.

[1]https://github.com/suno-ai/bark

Stable-audio and MusicGen sounds better than Jukebox.

But the best so far is Suno.ai ( https://app.suno.ai ) especially with their V3 model they have very impressive results, the fidelity is not studio quality but they're getting very close.

It's very likely based on their TTS model they have released before Bark, but trained on more data and with higher resolution.

https://github.com/suno-ai/bark

https://github.com/suno-ai/bark

> Bark was developed for research purposes. It is not a conventional text-to-speech model but instead a fully generative text-to-audio model, which can deviate in unexpected ways from provided prompts. Suno does not take responsibility for any output generated. Use at your own risk, and please act responsibly.

I've generated probably >200 songs now with Suno, of which perhaps 10 have been any good, and I can't detect any pattern in terms of the outputs.

Here's another one which is pretty good. I accidentally copied and pasted the prompt and lyrics, and it's amazing to me how 'musically' it renders the prompt:

hahah wow! cool :-)

PS: OT, I am reading this Bark thing(https://github.com/suno-ai/bark). Can I run it locally on a Macbook 2015 with 8GB RAM?

I have it locally. The model is on huggingface. It runs with about 8GB VRAM.

suno-ai/bark