7 ms·

On a Tangent: As I switched from macOS to arch linux, I was looking for a good text-to-speech option, cross platform and open-source. (I use it to get an first

On a Tangent: As I switched from macOS to arch linux, I was looking for a good text-to-speech option, cross platform and open-source. (I use it to get an first overview over larger, boring papers I'm reviewing ). pretty impressed by larynx so far: https://github.com/rhasspy/larynx https://github.com/rhasspy/larynx It seems also quite hackable. Will also play with NATSpeech.

albertzeyer 5y ago
TTS is a very active field of research. The things you see here, GlowTTS, PortaSpeech, Diffusion, etc, these are very new, published 2020 and 2021. Every couple of months there is a new model, which needs its own implementation. You will find a lot of code but that is research code, i.e. you need to understand the science behind it and it needs some effort to get it to run, and it will have lots of hard edges. When you ask for a usable cross platform and open source solution, this is different. Although, Larynx looks actually nice and usable, i.e. intended for the end user. The hard part of TTS systems is also to get all the edge cases right, like special symbols, abbreviations, special names, etc. And most research code does not care too much about this but is more about doing research such as developing new models. A manual lexicon with lots of custom rules is often used to cover all these cases but to maintain this is a lot of work and depends also on the use case. Or you could train another model for this part which will somehow work better than a simplistic lexicon but will still fail at many edge cases.
- synesthesiam 5y ago
  Due to licensing constraints, I wrote my own text frontend (MIT): https://github.com/rhasspy/gruut https://github.com/rhasspy/gruut I plan to release a version of Larynx that uses eSpeak for phonemization, since it covers many of those corner cases.
synesthesiam 5y ago
Larynx author here, glad you're enjoying it! I'm implementing a new TTS model (VITS) which sounds better and is about 2x faster in practice. Should be ready in the next month or so :)
- superasn 5y ago
  This sounds awesome. Is there a mailing list I can join to get a notification when it's released?
  - synesthesiam 5y ago
    I usually announce things on the Rhasspy voice assistant forums: https://community.rhasspy.org/ https://community.rhasspy.org/ I also have a Twitter account (@rhasspy) used almost exclusively for announcements.
    - kgarten 5y ago
      Impressive work. thanks a lot :)

albertzeyer 5y ago

TTS is a very active field of research. The things you see here, GlowTTS, PortaSpeech, Diffusion, etc, these are very new, published 2020 and 2021. Every couple of months there is a new model, which needs its own implementation. You will find a lot of code but that is research code, i.e. you need to understand the science behind it and it needs some effort to get it to run, and it will have lots of hard edges. When you ask for a usable cross platform and open source solution, this is different. Although, Larynx looks actually nice and usable, i.e. intended for the end user. The hard part of TTS systems is also to get all the edge cases right, like special symbols, abbreviations, special names, etc. And most research code does not care too much about this but is more about doing research such as developing new models. A manual lexicon with lots of custom rules is often used to cover all these cases but to maintain this is a lot of work and depends also on the use case. Or you could train another model for this part which will somehow work better than a simplistic lexicon but will still fail at many edge cases.

synesthesiam 5y ago
Due to licensing constraints, I wrote my own text frontend (MIT): https://github.com/rhasspy/gruut https://github.com/rhasspy/gruut I plan to release a version of Larynx that uses eSpeak for phonemization, since it covers many of those corner cases.

synesthesiam 5y ago

Larynx author here, glad you're enjoying it! I'm implementing a new TTS model (VITS) which sounds better and is about 2x faster in practice. Should be ready in the next month or so :)

superasn 5y ago
This sounds awesome. Is there a mailing list I can join to get a notification when it's released?
- synesthesiam 5y ago
  I usually announce things on the Rhasspy voice assistant forums: https://community.rhasspy.org/ https://community.rhasspy.org/ I also have a Twitter account (@rhasspy) used almost exclusively for announcements.
  - kgarten 5y ago
    Impressive work. thanks a lot :)