I wonder what would it take to extend it with a custom voice?
Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
151–160 of 383 posts
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does 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.
Depends 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)
Slightly 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.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#153The headline feature isn’t the 25 MB footprint alone. It’s that KittenTTS is Apache-2.0. That combo means you can embed a fully offline voice in Pi Zero-class hardware or even battery-powered toys without worrying about GPUs, cloud calls, or restrictive licenses. In one stroke it turns voice everywhere from a hardware/licensing problem into a packaging problem. Quality tweaks can come later; unlocking that deployment…
> It’s that KittenTTS is Apache-2.0
Have you seen the code[1] in the repo? It uses phonemizer[2] which is GPL-3.0 licensed. In its current state, it's effectively GPL licensed.
[1]: https://github.com/KittenML/KittenTTS/blob/main/kittentts/on...
[2]: https://github.com/bootphon/phonemizer
Edit: It looks like I replied to an LLM generated comment.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#154Microsoft's and some of Google's TTS models make the simplest mistakes. For instance, they sometimes read "i.e." as "for example." This is a problem if you have low vision and use TTS for, say, proofreading your emails. Why does it happen? I'm genuinely curious.
Well, speech synthesizers are pretty much famous for speaking all sorts of things wrong. But what I find very concerning about LLM based TTS is that some of them cant really speak numbers greater then 100. They try, but fail a lot. At least tts-1-hd was pretty much doing this for almost every 3 or 4 digit number. Especially noticeable when it is supposed to read a year number.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#155System Requirements Works literally everywhere Haha, on one of my machines my python version is too old, and the package/dependencies don't want to install. On another machie the python version is too new, and the package/dependencies don't want to install.
There are still people who use machine wide python installs instead of environments? Python dependency hell was already bad years ago, but today it's completely impractical to do it this way. Even on raspberries.
Debian pretty much "solved" this by making pip refuse to install packages if you are not in an venv.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#156Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#157Reddit post with generated audio sample: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mhyzp7/kitten_...
was it cross trained on futurama voices?
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#158Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#159This feels different. This feels like a genuinely monumental release. Holy cow.
Very well done. The quality is excellent and the technical parameters are, simply, unbelievable. Makes me want to try to embed this on a board just to see if it's possible.