[java_beyb]

they have been around since pre chatgpt era, and not relevant to chatgpt. chatgpt understands text, coqui reads text. they're a text-to-speech / voice cloning/voice generation company.

their founders were working at Mozilla when Mozilla sunset its speech products. They founded coqui and released text-to-speech models based on their previous work. They tried to do a mix of open-source and closed-source stuff and introduced weird licensing concept that I never understood. there are many mediocre to good open-source TTS alternatives. they might have struggled to differentiate.

it's sad that people complain about big tech dominance, yet don't pay startups. i dont know the founders but i suspect they will join a big tech company as most of the Mozilla team did and we'll keep feeding Amazon, Google and Microsoft.