3 ms·
a few weeks ago i used piper to create an acceptable translation of a book. i didn't listen to it all, but the result sounded better than anything i was able to
by em-bee 2y ago
a few weeks ago i used piper to create an acceptable translation of a book. i didn't listen to it all, but the result sounded better than anything i was able to listen to before. good enough to listen to a book if a human read one is not available. just a few years ago, this was not the case.
in other words, while FOSS TTS lags behind commercial options, it does get better and i expect within a few years it will produce results that are at least as good as the commercial options today if not fully caught up.
- asaddhamani 2y agoPiper seems roughly equivalent to old-school TTS outputs that sound flat, jumpy with the concatenative approach. Listen to this first example I tried: https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/samples/en/en_GB/alan/medium/speaker_0.mp3 https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/samples/en/en_GB/ala... Of all the TTS APIs I have tried, I like OpenAI voices the best. Haven't considered things like elevenlabs because I find them ridiculously expensive. I love voice to voice interfaces, but only when they sound natural to my ears, and the current pricing for good ones is prohibitive for a huge number of use cases.
- em-bee 2y agowell, i was comparing it to the free tools available a few years ago, and against that, this example is a markable improvement. it's the first that i could actually bear to listen to over a longer period of time. i expect just another few years and this will actually be good.