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Suno is kind of underselling this with their default voices. With just a little effort you get great stuff, very emotive, fantastic cadences. Here's my female D

Suno is kind of underselling this with their default voices. With just a little effort you get great stuff, very emotive, fantastic cadences. Here's my female David Attenborough I was playing around yesterday. Not the clearest but charming. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/163408/238257231-40905966-dad8-4798-8b93-6eb27f8d20e9.mp4 https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/163408/238257231-4... And Bark is more than TTS. While I haven't had much success with one-shotting full songs with Bark, you build a decent sample library with it. A few recent ones I saved, just randomly concatted here: https://soundcloud.com/jonathan-fly-620508219/bark-all-night-beats https://soundcloud.com/jonathan-fly-620508219/bark-all-night...

tmikaeld 3y ago
Definitely good! The hardest part still seem to get rid of the synthetic high pitch background noise, I've tried most of the text-to-voice synthesizers and ElevenLabs are still my benchmark. For example: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WL_5gFswhZncERGzSRh2hQ42RVr4MOxE/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WL_5gFswhZncERGzSRh2hQ42RVr...
- JonathanFly 3y ago
  I actually think Bark actually beats Eleven right now. Bark tends to add a bit more of a metallic twinge towards the end of longer audio segments (I wonder if this is a bug and not a limitation actually...), but Bark is more expressive. The trick to exceeding Eleven quality is using multiple speaker prompts, and swapping them in and out over the course of longer texts. Each is a slight variation on the original. If you hand tune the swaps it's super good, but if you just swap in 'beginning of new paragraph' 'continuation speaker' automatically, that alone is a huge boost. I don't have a clip handy but I will make a YouTube or something this week, because the quality is wild if you do this. There's some passable audio clips on my README here https://github.com/JonathanFly/bark https://github.com/JonathanFly/bark but all those are just using the same speaker for every line. That was all just the first samples I tried, from weeks ago, without really putting any effort into it. You can do a lot better. The extra expressiveness of Bark does come with it being harder to control and having a bit of a mind of its own at times. (And this can also be very very funny: https://twitter.com/jonathanfly/status/1657658109001596929 https://twitter.com/jonathanfly/status/1657658109001596929) So for a production or real time use case Eleven makes more sense. For example even my best speakers will switch to a new voice mid prompt, once in awhile. (As if the audio clip was from interview segment.)
  - tmikaeld 3y ago
    Thanks, I checked more of the bark examples and they definitely add the "personal" touch to it, elevenlabs sound more stale, so i definitely see what you mean. I also listened a few more times to your sample and it's one of the hardest types of voices to get to sound natural, when i tried a similar on elevenlabs, it sounded a lot worse in terms of the metallic s-s at the end. I'll set it up this weekend and play around with it :)
    - JonathanFly 3y ago
      >when i tried a similar on elevenlabs, it sounded a lot worse in terms of the metallic s-s at the end. That's interesting. When I'm judging Bark I'm looking at my own random samples, but for eleven I'm seeing stuff people post on Twitter or YouTube, which I suppose must be cherry-picked. I didn't even realize Eleven did the same thing!
      - tmikaeld 3y ago
        I guess it's similar to what you mentioned with bark, the more training and custom adaptation that can be done, the less metallic it will sound. I tested with random voices until i got one that was similar, the existing Bella voice is almost as your sample but has very little metallic s-s.
terhechte 3y ago
I'm curious, how did you generate the David Attenborough voice? The repo says: > Bark tries to match the tone, pitch, emotion and prosody of a given preset, but does not currently support custom voice cloning.
- JonathanFly 3y ago
  >I'm curious, how did you generate the David Attenborough voice? The repo says: >> Bark tries to match the tone, pitch, emotion and prosody of a given preset, but does not currently support custom voice cloning Check back later in the week, I'll have a bit more on that later after I catch up on actual work and can write a bit.
  - terhechte 3y ago
    Thanks!
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  https://github.com/serp-ai/bark-with-voice-clone https://github.com/serp-ai/bark-with-voice-clone
  - JonathanFly 3y ago
    Not used at all, at least in my case.
    - famouswaffles 3y ago
      I understand you didn't use that repo but did you do something other than change the audio prompt ?
      - JonathanFly 3y ago
        Yeah, it's kind of hand crafted. There's more to the story and more results. I would normally just Tweet but I think it's actually so interesting that it deserves more than a tweet, at least a thoughtful writeup or a youtube video. (And I need to catch up on real work this week first, so end of week at best.)
famouswaffles 3y ago
Yeah I was trying to figure out how good it was in Korean. The cadence and flow was pretty good but there was kind of artifacts in the audio. Then I check the samples of the default audio prompts for Korean any my god, they were godawful. Switching it up made a world of difference.
- JonathanFly 3y ago
  >Yeah I was trying to figure out how good it was in Korean. The cadence and flow was pretty good but there was kind of artifacts in the audio. Then I check the samples of the default audio prompts for Korean any my god, they were godawful. Switching it up made a world of difference. I have a decent amount really clear Korean voices BTW. That and French, from people asking on Discord. But I can't judge the accents only that they are clear speakers. Korean was interestingly the lone somewhat-coherent one-shot long term music sample I ever managed to get out of Bark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pV9d25KqCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pV9d25KqCE The second music bit in this Youtube was one continuous generation where the last prompt was used as the history for the next, with no cherry picking or assembling the clips, just one solid segment. And it sort of holds together for like almost a minute! I was excited because I thought maybe Bark could be like a real-time OpenAI Jukebox. But that was literally the only time so far where using a full-feedback held together like that. You can kind of 'cheat' it to by using a very popular song as the input text, and sometimes Bark will produce the appropriate melody. But of course that's not really the point of using your own text. I have some ideas for making it more coherent, but nothing easy. Too bad, Jukebox is just SO SLOW. Actually with what I know now I should re-render this and clean up the distortion. At the time I couldn't do it. Though I only have the first segment prompt. I have a decent amount really clear Korean voices BTW. But I can't judge the accents, only that they are clear.

tmikaeld 3y ago

Definitely good! The hardest part still seem to get rid of the synthetic high pitch background noise, I've tried most of the text-to-voice synthesizers and ElevenLabs are still my benchmark. For example: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WL_5gFswhZncERGzSRh2hQ42RVr4MOxE/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WL_5gFswhZncERGzSRh2hQ42RVr...

JonathanFly 3y ago
I actually think Bark actually beats Eleven right now. Bark tends to add a bit more of a metallic twinge towards the end of longer audio segments (I wonder if this is a bug and not a limitation actually...), but Bark is more expressive. The trick to exceeding Eleven quality is using multiple speaker prompts, and swapping them in and out over the course of longer texts. Each is a slight variation on the original. If you hand tune the swaps it's super good, but if you just swap in 'beginning of new paragraph' 'continuation speaker' automatically, that alone is a huge boost. I don't have a clip handy but I will make a YouTube or something this week, because the quality is wild if you do this. There's some passable audio clips on my README here https://github.com/JonathanFly/bark https://github.com/JonathanFly/bark but all those are just using the same speaker for every line. That was all just the first samples I tried, from weeks ago, without really putting any effort into it. You can do a lot better. The extra expressiveness of Bark does come with it being harder to control and having a bit of a mind of its own at times. (And this can also be very very funny: https://twitter.com/jonathanfly/status/1657658109001596929 https://twitter.com/jonathanfly/status/1657658109001596929) So for a production or real time use case Eleven makes more sense. For example even my best speakers will switch to a new voice mid prompt, once in awhile. (As if the audio clip was from interview segment.)
- tmikaeld 3y ago
  Thanks, I checked more of the bark examples and they definitely add the "personal" touch to it, elevenlabs sound more stale, so i definitely see what you mean. I also listened a few more times to your sample and it's one of the hardest types of voices to get to sound natural, when i tried a similar on elevenlabs, it sounded a lot worse in terms of the metallic s-s at the end. I'll set it up this weekend and play around with it :)
  - JonathanFly 3y ago
    >when i tried a similar on elevenlabs, it sounded a lot worse in terms of the metallic s-s at the end. That's interesting. When I'm judging Bark I'm looking at my own random samples, but for eleven I'm seeing stuff people post on Twitter or YouTube, which I suppose must be cherry-picked. I didn't even realize Eleven did the same thing!
    - tmikaeld 3y ago
      I guess it's similar to what you mentioned with bark, the more training and custom adaptation that can be done, the less metallic it will sound. I tested with random voices until i got one that was similar, the existing Bella voice is almost as your sample but has very little metallic s-s.

terhechte 3y ago

I'm curious, how did you generate the David Attenborough voice? The repo says: > Bark tries to match the tone, pitch, emotion and prosody of a given preset, but does not currently support custom voice cloning.

JonathanFly 3y ago
>I'm curious, how did you generate the David Attenborough voice? The repo says: >> Bark tries to match the tone, pitch, emotion and prosody of a given preset, but does not currently support custom voice cloning Check back later in the week, I'll have a bit more on that later after I catch up on actual work and can write a bit.
- terhechte 3y ago
  Thanks!
famouswaffles 3y ago
https://github.com/serp-ai/bark-with-voice-clone https://github.com/serp-ai/bark-with-voice-clone
- JonathanFly 3y ago
  Not used at all, at least in my case.
  - famouswaffles 3y ago
    I understand you didn't use that repo but did you do something other than change the audio prompt ?
    - JonathanFly 3y ago
      Yeah, it's kind of hand crafted. There's more to the story and more results. I would normally just Tweet but I think it's actually so interesting that it deserves more than a tweet, at least a thoughtful writeup or a youtube video. (And I need to catch up on real work this week first, so end of week at best.)

famouswaffles 3y ago

Yeah I was trying to figure out how good it was in Korean. The cadence and flow was pretty good but there was kind of artifacts in the audio. Then I check the samples of the default audio prompts for Korean any my god, they were godawful. Switching it up made a world of difference.

JonathanFly 3y ago
>Yeah I was trying to figure out how good it was in Korean. The cadence and flow was pretty good but there was kind of artifacts in the audio. Then I check the samples of the default audio prompts for Korean any my god, they were godawful. Switching it up made a world of difference. I have a decent amount really clear Korean voices BTW. That and French, from people asking on Discord. But I can't judge the accents only that they are clear speakers. Korean was interestingly the lone somewhat-coherent one-shot long term music sample I ever managed to get out of Bark. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pV9d25KqCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pV9d25KqCE The second music bit in this Youtube was one continuous generation where the last prompt was used as the history for the next, with no cherry picking or assembling the clips, just one solid segment. And it sort of holds together for like almost a minute! I was excited because I thought maybe Bark could be like a real-time OpenAI Jukebox. But that was literally the only time so far where using a full-feedback held together like that. You can kind of 'cheat' it to by using a very popular song as the input text, and sometimes Bark will produce the appropriate melody. But of course that's not really the point of using your own text. I have some ideas for making it more coherent, but nothing easy. Too bad, Jukebox is just SO SLOW. Actually with what I know now I should re-render this and clean up the distortion. At the time I couldn't do it. Though I only have the first segment prompt. I have a decent amount really clear Korean voices BTW. But I can't judge the accents, only that they are clear.