[echelon]

I'm the author of FakeYou.com and can speak to Tortoise and the TTS field.

Tortoise produces quality results with limited training data, but is an extremely slow model that is not suitable for real time use cases. You can't build an app with it. It's good for creatives making one-off deepfake YouTube videos, and that's about it.

You're looking for Tacotron 2 or one of its offshoots that add multi-speaker, TorchMoji, etc. You'll want to pair it with the Hifi-Gan vocoder to get end-to-end text to speech. (Avoid Griffin-Lim and WaveGlow.)

Your pipeline looks like this at a high level:

  Input text => Text pre-processing => Synthesizer => Vocoder => [ Optional transcoding ] => Output audio

TalkNet is also popular when a secondary reference pitch signal is supplied. You can mimic singing and emotion pretty easily.

These three models are faster than real time, and there's a lot of information available and a big community built up around them. FakeYou's Discord has a bunch of people that can show you how to train these models, and there are other Discord communities that offer the same assistance.

If you want to train your own voice using your own collected sample data, you can experiment with it on Google Colab and on FakeYou, then reuse the same model file by hosting it in a cloud GPU instance. We can also do the hosting for you if that's not your desire or forte.

In any case, these models are solid choices for building consumer apps. As long as you have a GPU, you're good to go. If you're not interested in building or maintaining your own, you can use our API! I'd be happy to help.

[weinzierl]

> "Tortoise produces quality results with limited training data, but is an extremely slow model that is not suitable for real time use cases"

What would run if you had large set of training data (and time and money) but your focus is on quality? Still Tortoise?

[o_____________o]

Maybe coqui:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33438487

But:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34188255

[godelski]

Thanks for this, I actually appreciate the honesty. It is always difficult for me to parse the actual quality of things I don't have intimate experience with.

Can I ask another question? If I wanted to hack around with STT and TTS (inference only) on a pi (4B+) is there anything that is approximately appropriate and can be done on device? (I could process on my main machine but I'd love to do it on the pi even with a decent delay)

[Oranguru]

For STT, take a look at Wenet: https://github.com/wenet-e2e/wenet

They provide support for running in a Raspberry Pi and it runs in real-time. I have tried the desktop version and the quality is good enough when the audio is clean.

[echelon]

No problem!

There are other ML TTS models that are both lightweight and can run on a CPU. Check out Glow-TTS for something that will probably work.

Also swap out the HifiGan vocoder for Melgan or MB-Melgan as these will also better support your use case.

I ran this exact setup on cheap Digital Ocean droplets (without GPUs) and it ran faster than real time. It should work on a Pi.

Unfortunately I'm not aware of STT models that operate under these same hardware constraints, but you should be good to go for TTS. With a little bit of poking around, I'm sure you can find a solution for STT too.