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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

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.

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.