4 ms·

This is somewhat off-topic, but here goes: It seems to me that English TTS is already extremely good, even if you're looking at implementations that are far fr

This is somewhat off-topic, but here goes: It seems to me that English TTS is already extremely good, even if you're looking at implementations that are far from being the best ones for English. ...and sometimes I wonder, if it's really economically efficient for that many players to compete on making English TTS yet another hair's breadth better than the next guy's, while TTS for languages other than English is this vast field of unmet market demand. At least these guys are doing Chinese, so: good for them. Last time I looked into TTS systems for German, Google was the only game in town. What I wouldn't give for a viable alternative! It doesn't even need to be open source, I'd be quite ready to pay top dollar.

throwthrowuknow 2y ago
https://elevenlabs.io/ https://elevenlabs.io/ And choose German for a sample. Not sure if it’s good enough for your needs but they have a wide variety of languages and voices.
- stakhanov 2y ago
  Thanks for the pointer. This does indeed look pretty good. Do you happen to know if they're using any APIs underneath the covers? Or are they fully self-contained?
  - aprilnya 2y ago
    ElevenLabs is their own thing, they make the models themselves
DelightOne 2y ago
OpenAI's API says they support German? Never tried it though. https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/text-to-speech https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/text-to-speech
follower 2y ago
> Last time I looked into TTS systems for German, Google was the only game in town. What I wouldn't give for a viable alternative! It doesn't even need to be open source, I'd be quite ready to pay top dollar. Will you still pay top dollar if it is open source though? :D Piper TTS[0] (MIT Licensed; developed by main dev of Larynx TTS, Mimic3 TTS & Rhasspy voice assistant) has support for ~30 languages, at least some of which have multiple voices available--in a range of quality & data licenses. And, particularly fortuitous for your needs, potentially, there's at at least one German voice that was recorded[1] specifically for Piper[2] (with emotion variants and CC0-licensed, no less :) )... Check out `thorsten` & `thorsten_emotional` on the samples page: https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/ https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/ I can't speak to the quality of the German voice specifically but for English at least I've found Piper's quality & range of voices of use[3]. ---- footnotes ---- [0] https://github.com/rhasspy/piper https://github.com/rhasspy/piper [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL19C7uchWZeojjI5FUk3qU9jqGB05w5nE https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL19C7uchWZeojjI5FUk3q... [2] In addition to other German voices based on other sources: https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/tree/main/de/de_DE https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/tree/main/de/de_... [3] Somewhat of an understatement.
- stakhanov 2y ago
  Thanks for the pointers! Will look into those. > Will you still pay top dollar if it is open source though? :D There is one OS project that I do support financially. If I get commercial value out of any of the above, I imagine I would do the same.
lucw 2y ago
Have you looked at Azure TTS voices? They, and not Google are the dominant player in TTS offerings.

throwthrowuknow 2y ago

https://elevenlabs.io/ https://elevenlabs.io/ And choose German for a sample. Not sure if it’s good enough for your needs but they have a wide variety of languages and voices.

stakhanov 2y ago
Thanks for the pointer. This does indeed look pretty good. Do you happen to know if they're using any APIs underneath the covers? Or are they fully self-contained?
- aprilnya 2y ago
  ElevenLabs is their own thing, they make the models themselves

DelightOne 2y ago

OpenAI's API says they support German? Never tried it though. https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/text-to-speech https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/text-to-speech

follower 2y ago

> Last time I looked into TTS systems for German, Google was the only game in town. What I wouldn't give for a viable alternative! It doesn't even need to be open source, I'd be quite ready to pay top dollar. Will you still pay top dollar if it is open source though? :D Piper TTS[0] (MIT Licensed; developed by main dev of Larynx TTS, Mimic3 TTS & Rhasspy voice assistant) has support for ~30 languages, at least some of which have multiple voices available--in a range of quality & data licenses. And, particularly fortuitous for your needs, potentially, there's at at least one German voice that was recorded[1] specifically for Piper[2] (with emotion variants and CC0-licensed, no less :) )... Check out `thorsten` & `thorsten_emotional` on the samples page: https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/ https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/ I can't speak to the quality of the German voice specifically but for English at least I've found Piper's quality & range of voices of use[3]. ---- footnotes ---- [0] https://github.com/rhasspy/piper https://github.com/rhasspy/piper [1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL19C7uchWZeojjI5FUk3qU9jqGB05w5nE https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL19C7uchWZeojjI5FUk3q... [2] In addition to other German voices based on other sources: https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/tree/main/de/de_DE https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/tree/main/de/de_... [3] Somewhat of an understatement.

stakhanov 2y ago
Thanks for the pointers! Will look into those. > Will you still pay top dollar if it is open source though? :D There is one OS project that I do support financially. If I get commercial value out of any of the above, I imagine I would do the same.

lucw 2y ago

Have you looked at Azure TTS voices? They, and not Google are the dominant player in TTS offerings.