5 ms·
Web version: https://clowerweb.github.io/kitten-tts-web-demo/ https://clowerweb.github.io/kitten-tts-web-demo/ It sounds ok, but impressive for the size.
by blopker 1y ago
Web version: https://clowerweb.github.io/kitten-tts-web-demo/ https://clowerweb.github.io/kitten-tts-web-demo/
It sounds ok, but impressive for the size.
- nine_k 1y agoDoes anybody find it funny that sci-fi movies have to heavily distort "robot voices" to make them sound "convincingly robotic"? A robotic, explicitly non-natural voice would be perfectly acceptable, and even desirable, in many situations. I don't expect a smart toaster to talk like a BBC host; it'd be enough is the speech if easy to recognize.
- roywiggins 1y agoThis one is at least an interesting idea: https://genderlessvoice.com/ https://genderlessvoice.com/
- cosmojg 1y agoThe voice sounds great! I find it quite aesthetically pleasing, but it's far from genderless.
- a96 1y agoSo, what's the gender?
- degamad 1y agoInteresting concept, but why is that site filled with Top X blogspam?
- pbronez 1y agoThe YouTube video [1] was published in 2019. The Blog spam posts range from Nov 2022 to July 2023. Other than the video, the only relevant content is on the about page [2]. It says the voice is a collaboration between 5 different entities, including advocacy groups, marketing firms and a music producer. The video is the only example of the voice in use. There is no API, weights, SDK, etc. I suspect this was a one-off marketing stunt sponsored by Copenhagen pride before the pandemic. The initial reaction was strong enough that a couple years they were still getting a small but steady flow of traffic. One of the involved marketing firms decided to monetize the asset and defaced it with blog spam. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvv6zYOQqm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvv6zYOQqm0 [2] https://genderlessvoice.com/about/ https://genderlessvoice.com/about/
- dang 1y agoMeet Q, a Genderless Voice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19505835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19505835 - March 2019 (235 comments)
- cyberax 1y agoIt doesn't sound genderless.
- pbronez 1y agoHuh. Sounds perfectly intelligible and definitively artificial. Feels weakly feminine to me, but only because I was primed to think about gender from the branding. It’s a good choice for a robot voice. It’s easier to understand than the formant synths or deliberately distorted human voices. The genderless aspect is alien enough to avoid the uncanny valley. You intuitively know you’re dealing with something a little different.
- qmr 1y agoThanks, I hate it.
- userbinator 1y agoA robotic, explicitly non-natural voice would be perfectly acceptable, and even desirable, in many situations[...]it'd be enough is the speech if easy to recognize. We've had formant synths for several decades, and they're perfectly understandable and require a tiny amount of computing power, but people tend not to want to listen to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth https://simulationcorner.net/index.php?page=sam https://simulationcorner.net/index.php?page=sam (try it yourself to hear what it sounds like)
- saretup 1y agoWell, this one is a bit too jarring to the ears.
- rixed 1y agoBut there is no latency, as opposed to KittenTTS, so it certainly has its applications too.
- cess11 1y agoTry this demo, which has more knobs: https://discordier.github.io/sam/ https://discordier.github.io/sam/
- actionfromafar 1y agoI think it's charming
- miki123211 1y agoSAM and the way it works is not what people typically associate with the term "formant synthesizer." DECtalk[1,2] would be a much better example, that's as formant as you get. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk [2] https://webspeak.terminal.ink https://webspeak.terminal.ink
- tapper 1y agoYeah blind people love eloquence
- Twirrim 1y ago> I don't expect a smart toaster to talk like a BBC host; Well sure, the BBC have already established that it's supposed to sound like a brit doing an impersonation of an American: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec
- incone123 1y agoDepends on the movie. Ash and Bishop in the Alien franchise sound human until there's a dramatic reason to sound more 'robotic'. I agree with your wider point. I use Google TTS with Moon+Reader all the time (I tried audio books read by real humans but I prefer the consistency of TTS)
- regularfry 1y agoSlightly different there because it's important in both cases that Ripley (and we) can't tell they're androids until it's explicitly uncovered. The whole point is that they're not presented as artificial. Same in Blade Runner: "more human than human". You don't have a film without the ambiguity there.
- incone123 1y agoYou're right. I should have used Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide as an example instead. There's very light processing on his speech.
- looperhacks 1y agoI remember that the novelization of the fifth element describes that the cops are taught to speak as robotic as possible when using speakers for some reason. Always found the idea weird that someone would _want_ that
- addandsubtract 1y agoIf you're on a Mac, you can type "say [thing to say]" into your terminal.
- msgodel 1y agoI personally prefer the older synthetic voices for TTS when the text is coming from software or a language model.
- mfro 1y agoIn the Culture novels, Iain Banks imagines that we would become uncomfortable with the uncanny realism of transmitted voices / holograms, and intentionally include some level of distortion to indicate you're speaking to an image
- quantummagic 1y agoDoesn't work here. Backend module returns 404 : https://clowerweb.github.io/node_modules/onnxruntime-web/dist/ort-wasm-simd-threaded.jsep.mjs https://clowerweb.github.io/node_modules/onnxruntime-web/dis...
- Retr0id 1y agoLooks like this commit 15 minutes ago broke it https://github.com/clowerweb/kitten-tts-web-demo/commit/6b5cfdd9601d184a9076a05f8205ac35684a890a https://github.com/clowerweb/kitten-tts-web-demo/commit/6b5c... (seems reverted now)
- kenarsa 1y ago[flagged]
- satvikpendem 1y agoDoes an apk for Android exist for replacing its speech to text engine? I tried sherpa-onnx but it was too slow for real time usage it seemed, and especially so for audiobooks when sped up.
- kenarsa 1y ago[flagged]
- satvikpendem 1y agoI can't test this out right now, is this just a demo or is it actually an apk for replacing the engine? Because those are two different things, the latter can be used any time you want to read something aloud on the page for example. This is the sherpa-onnx one I'm talking about. https://k2-fsa.github.io/sherpa/onnx/tts/apk-engine.html https://k2-fsa.github.io/sherpa/onnx/tts/apk-engine.html
- gary_0 1y agoNot open source. "You will need internet connectivity to validate your AccessKey with Picovoice license servers ... If you wish to increase your limits, you can purchase a subscription plan." https://github.com/Picovoice/orca#accesskey https://github.com/Picovoice/orca#accesskey
- cakealert 1y agoGoing online is a dealbreaker but if you really need it you could use ghidra to fix that. I had tried to find a conversion of their model to onnx (making their proprietary pipeline useless) but failed. Hopefully open source will render them irrelevant in the future.
- papichulo2023 1y ago
- Retr0id 1y agoI tried to replicate their demo text but it doesn't sound as good for some reason. If anyone else wants to try: > Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. Our smallest model is less than 25 megabytes.
- itake 1y ago> Error generating speech: failed to call OrtRun(). ERROR_CODE: 2, ERROR_MESSAGE: Non-zero status code returned while running Expand node. Name:'/bert/Expand' Status Message: invalid expand shape Doesn't seem to work with thai.
- jainilprajapati 1y agoYou can also try on https://clowerweb.github.io/node_modules/onnxruntime-web/dist/ort-wasm-simd-threaded.jsep.mjs https://clowerweb.github.io/node_modules/onnxruntime-web/dis...
- nxnsxnbx 1y agoThanks, I was looking for that. While the reddit demo sounds ok, even though on a level we reached a couple of years ago, all TTS samples I tried were barley understandable at all
- divamgupta 1y agoThis is just an early checkpoint. We hope that the quality will improve in the future.
- bkyan 1y agoI got an error when I tried the demo with 6 sentences, but it worked great when I reduced the text to 3 sentences. Is the length limit due to the model or just a limitation for the demo?
- divamgupta 1y agoCurrently we don't have chunking enabled yet. We will add it soon. That will remove the length limitations.
- cess11 1y agoPerhaps a length limit? I tried this: "This first Book proposes, first in brief, the whole Subject, Mans disobedience, and the loss thereupon of Paradise wherein he was plac't: Then touches the prime cause of his fall, the Serpent, or rather Satan in the Serpent; who revolting from God, and drawing to his side many Legions of Angels, was by the command of God driven out of Heaven with all his Crew into the great Deep." It takes a while until it starts generating sound on my i7 cores but it kind of works. This also works: "blah. bleh. blih. bloh. blyh. bluh." So I don't think it's a limit on punctuation. Voice quality is quite bad though, not as far from the old school C64 SAM (https://discordier.github.io/sam/ https://discordier.github.io/sam/) of the eighties as I expected.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- belchiorb 1y agoThis doesn’t seem to work on Safari. Works great on Chrome, though
- divamgupta 1y agoHmm, we will look into it.
- tapper 1y agoYou should post on the NVDA email list. https://nvda.groups.io/g/nvda https://nvda.groups.io/g/nvda Or the Screen reader list: https://winaccess.groups.io/g/winaccess https://winaccess.groups.io/g/winaccess FYI blind people do not like any lag when reading that’s is why so many still use eloquence and espeak.
- rohan_joshi 1y agoyeah, this is just a preview model from an early checkpoint. the full model release will be next week which includes a 15M model and an 80M model, both of which will have much higher quality than this preview.
- Aardwolf 1y agoOn PC it's a python dependency hell but someone managed to package it in self contained JS code that works offline once it loaded the model? How is that done?
- a2128 1y agoONNXRuntime makes it fairly easy, you just need to provide a path to the ONNX file, give it inputs in the correct format, and use the outputs. The ONNXRuntime library handles the rest. You can see this in the main.js file: https://github.com/clowerweb/kitten-tts-web-demo/blob/main/main.js https://github.com/clowerweb/kitten-tts-web-demo/blob/main/m... Plus, Python software are dependency hell in general, while webpages have to be self-contained by their nature (thank god we no longer have Silverlight and Java applets...)
- scotty79 1y agoIt feels like it doesn't handle punctuation well. I don't hear sentence boundaries and commas. It sounds like continuous stream of words.
- Jotalea 1y agoUsing male voice 2 at 48kHz at 0.5x speed sounds a lot like Madeline's voice lines in Celeste. Seemed funny to me.
- rldjbpin 1y agobesides issues with webgpu (it is in beta fwiw), it'd be nice to increase voice speed through the setting without affecting the voice pitch.