Edge TTS(github.com) |
If you are looking for a commercial API, I just launched a TTS API powered by the the best performing open source model Kokoro: https://www.lemonfox.ai/text-to-speech-api. The API is compatible with OpenAI and ElevenLabs and up to 25x cheaper.
Basically, it's a very bad idea to use this library for anything serious/mission critical. It also is really limited to only taking in text (i.e., no custom SSML, emotion elements, etc) as Microsoft restricts the API to only the features Microsoft Edge itself already supports. Generally commercial users would want these more advanced features and so they'd want to use Azure Cognitive Services.
At any rate this library was never really marketed, I'm not sure how it blew up. It was really only intended so that I can have audio files I can play back for my Home Assistant instance. Later, I started using it to generate e-books. In general, these are the two main uses of the library AFAIK.
I believe this used to be available for edge tts, very sad to see they removed it.
If anyone knows of comparable projects that implement something like SSML please do share.
> Melania Trump's zip code is 20001.
It says "Melaynia Trump's zip code is twenty-thousand one". With SSML, you can tell the engine the correct pronunciation and to say a string of numbers digit-by-digit. Spelling proper nouns differently to trick it into pronouncing it correctly works until it doesn't.
Being able to tell it to pronounce "Melania" like [ˌməˈlɑːn.jə] or [%m@"lA:n.j@] and tweak other aspects of the synthesis with SSML is, in my opinion, an important part of a commercial speech synthesis offering.
I wonder how much effort is needed to make these engines work with SSML. Kokoro+SSML would be awesome.
For my use case, I'd need access to a wide variety of languages, and ideally 5+ voices per language. I'm currently using Amazon Polly, but I wonder if there's something better now.
Click the leaderboard tab here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/TTS-AGI/TTS-Arena
I believe the Edge API supports more models:
https://gist.github.com/BettyJJ/17cbaa1de96235a7f5773b8690a2...
Do you know any commercial licensed TTS that support 50+ languages and are relatively small (e.g. many small models, not 1 big model)? Meta's open models supports like 300 languages, but the license doesn't permit commercial use :-/
Acapela, Nuance - but its around 75 languages.
>> edge-tts is a Python module that allows you to use Microsoft Edge's online text-to-speech service from within your Python code or using the provided edge-tts or edge-playback command.
Also, ironically enough, ElevenLabs lunched a readerapp for iOS and Android, which allows you to text to speech for "free" in some limited voice selections, but the app is not available for PC or as browser extension. So like "we give you unlimited tts but only if you use your smartphone"
function tts() {
if [ -p /dev/stdin ]; then
edge-playback --file -
else
edge-playback --text "$*"
fi
}Is there any equivalent program for ebooks? If not can someone build one? The dream would be to plop in an arbitrary document (pdf, docs, tex, epub, and so on) and have it read to me by a reasonable TTS at a speed of my choosing and have words / lines highlighted as the TTS goes along. Bonus points if you can regularly identify and skip things that are not necessarily relevant like page numbers, headers, footnote markers, and so on, which is something that Edge TTS within Edge struggles with when reading PDFs.
https://www.pdq.com/blog/powershell-text-to-speech-examples/
Now that I try it on desktop, it's really good! I might try to use the python script in the future
I'm curious, would this be the legal equivalent of "cracked" software in terms of piracy?
As for comparable projects, you can use Azure's offerings instead. They have a free tier that's really generous.
But I thought the LinkedIn lawsuit settled that crawlers are ok, as long as you're not republishing the content?
Comparing an API that typically requires a key and a public website is absurd.
Microsoft cannot move fast enough to present any real concern to someone who is dedicated.
The Microsoft login seems more reasonable, at that point they can filter out bad actors presumably.
Especially the rhythm and timing is often very jarring making words difficult to understand, especially when the pitch is not quite right.
It also doesn't seem to know about pacing, ignoring semicolon and comma.
Combined I often need to think hard about what it just said, or even listen to it again.
I also notice these issues in the various English voice models to varying degrees, so seems to be an inherent problem. Or can it be improved significantly with training it yourself?
I’m sure it’s possible to train new voices.
The English voices are hit or miss, but some voices have up to 900 speakers so it should be able to find a nice voice in the hay stack.
The thing I like about piper is it is so fast. I set it up to stream the output to VLC and it starts speaking in less than a second even on my laptop.
I wish it could have eleven labs quality but right now the speed is the most important factor for what I’m doing with it.
This was also reflected in the voice output of espeak-ng, even though it's overall quality was vastly subpar compared to Piper TTS (as expected).
So it seems that improving this aspect might be one way to get better performance out of Piper for my language. Not sure how easy that'll be tho...
Azure like you say is pretty decent, Google does an ok enough job but not as good.