FOfollower·Apr 28, 2023
The most exciting thing about Home Assistant's "Year of the Voice", for me, is that it is apparently enabling/supporting @synesthesiam's continued phenomenal contributions to the FLOSS off-line voice synthesis space.
The quality, variety & diversity of voices that synesthesiam's "Larynx" TTS project (https://github.com/rhasspy/larynx/) made available, completely transformed the Free/Open Source Text To Speech landscape.
In addition "OpenTTS" (https://github.com/synesthesiam/opentts) provided a common API for interacting with multiple FLOSS TTS projects which showed great promise for actually enabling "standing on the shoulders of" rather than re-inventing the same basic functionality every time.
The new "Piper" TTS project mentioned in the article is the apparent successor to Larynx and, along with the accompanying LibriTTS/LibriVox-based
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voice models, brings to FLOSS TTS something it's never had before:
* Too many voices! :)
Seriously, the current LibriTTS voice model version has 900+ voices (of varying quality levels), how do you even navigate that many?![0]
And that's not even considering the even higher quality single speaker models based on other audio recording sources.
Offline TTS while immensely valuable for individuals, doesn't seem to be attractive domain for most commercial entities due to lack of lock-in/telemetry opportunities so I was concerned that we might end up missing out on further valuable contributions from synesthesiam's specialised skills & experience due to financial realities & the human need for food. :)
I'm glad we instead get to see what happens next.
[0] See my follow-up comment about this.