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Mozilla partners with Nvidia to democratize and diversify voice technology
- exporectomy 6y agoI hope all this data helps us get better free text-to-speech libraries even for English. There's good quality speech synthesis built into OSs like Windows and MacOS and online services from Google, but if you want to include a library in your own local software, the existing open source options are all equally Steven Hawking sounding.
- franga2000 6y agoWhy include it in your app though? That's inefficient and inconsistent. If your OS has speech support, using that is going to be the best experience for the user. We definitely do need a good FOSS speech library, but it should only be used in a backend for speech-dispatcher and backend/headless apps, not anything user-facing. The OS exist for a reason.
- atat7024 6y agoSecurity. Privacy.
- franga2000 6y agoFrom your OS? If your can't trust your OS, you have bigger problems.
- exporectomy 6y agoLinux doesn't. It'd be nice if all OS's did but until then, you have to do it in your own app. Why only as a backend? Why not just compiled into applications that use it like any other library?
- throwaway189262 6y agoMozilla TTS is a great open source speech generator that uses state of the art ML models. https://github.com/mozilla/TTS https://github.com/mozilla/TTS If you need good TTS, this is it. It sounds as good as Google, Apple, or Amazon products, if you have a good data set. The pre trained models are decent enough for real use cases. Datasets are the problem. Quality data is expensive. It takes about 24 hours of aligned and annotated quality voice samples to make a model. The most common "open" dataset is LJSpeech. It's kinda noisy and recorded with a bad mic. And that greatly degrades quality of generated audio. It's still miles better than anything 5+ years ago, but has a metallic quality. If anyone is interested, you can record your own voice to make a model for Mozilla TTS. What isn't talked about, is that modern ML voice models aren't synthetic voices, they're audio deepfakes. Clones. We're talking to the point your friends couldn't tell if it was you or the model on the phone. Some people might find that scary but I think it's incredibly cool. If you build a great quality model for Mozilla TTS your voice can outlive you.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoIs there a guide you could recommend on building your own Mozilla TTS model? Or is the repo you linked to sufficient?
- throwaway189262 6y agoIt's barely sufficient. Much of the docs is in various pull requests from others adding models. In another reply a user posted a better maintained fork repo
- toomuchtodo 6y agoThank you!
- molza 6y agoI think the creator of the project has moved on and it is not maintained anymore. But they have https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS
- joana035 6y agoIt would be great if we start democratization with some fundamental needs first: the drivers.
- hu3 6y agoThere was a related announcement 1 month ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m18rbg/donate_your_voice_to_an_opensource_project_by/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m18rbg/donate_your...
- rpg3 6y agoHopefully they'll be able to give DeepSpeech some more love as well.