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Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

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Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#231

Post by woadwarrior01 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #219
woadwarrior01 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This would only apply if they were distributing the GPL licensed code alongside their own code. If my MIT-licensed one-line Python library has this line of code… run([“bash”, “-c”, “echo hello”]) …I’m not suddenly subject to bash’s licensing. For anyone wanting to run my stuff though, they’re going to need to make sure they themselves have bash installed. (But, to argue against my own point, if an OS vendor ships my…

This is a false analogy. It's quite straightforward.

Running bash (via exec()/fork()/spawn()/etc) isn't the same as (statically or dynamically) linking with its codebase. If your MIT-licensed one-liner links to code that's GPL licensed, then it gets infected by the GPL license.

Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#232

Post by pbronez »

wongarsu wrote: post #213
Dayshine wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It mentions ONNX, so I imagine an ONNX model is or will be available. ONNX runtime is a single library, with C#'s package being ~115MB compressed. Not tiny, but usually only a few lines to actually run and only a single dependency.

The repository already runs an ONNX model. But the onnx model doesn't get English text as input, it gets tokenized phonemes. The prepocessing for that is where most of the dependencies come from. Which is completely reasonable imho, but obviously comes with tradeoffs.

For space sensitive applications like embedded systems, could you shift the preprocessing to compile time?

You would need to constrain the vocabulary to see any benefits, but that could be reasonable. For example, you an enumeration of numbers, units and metric names could handle dynamic time, temperature and other dashboard items.

For something more complex like offline navigation, you already need to store a map. You could store street names as tokens instead of text. Add a few turn commands, and you have offline spoken directions without on device pre-processing.

Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#233

Post by C-Loftus »

Awesome work! Often times in the TTS space, human-similarity is given way too much emphasis at the expense of hurting user access. Frankly as long as a voice is clear and you listen to it for a while, the brain filters out most quirks you would perceive on the first pass. Hence why many blind folks still are perfectly fine using espeak-ng. The other properties like speed of generation and size make it worth it.

I've been using a custom AI audiobook generation program [0] with piper for quite a while now and am very excited to look at integrating kitten. Historically piper has been the only good option for a free CPU-only local model so I am super happy to see more competition in the space. Easy installation is a big deal, since piper historically has had issues with that. (Hence why I had to add auto installation support in [0])

[0] https://github.com/C-Loftus/QuickPiperAudiobook

Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#234

Post by willwade »

Aachen wrote: post #203
mlboss wrote: post #9

Reddit post with generated audio sample: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mhyzp7/kitten_...

Impressive technical achievement, but in terms of whether I'd use it: oof, that male voice is like one of these fake-excited newsreaders. Like they're always at the edge of their breath. The female one is better but still someone reading out an advertisement for a product they were told they must act extra excited for. I assume this is what the majority of training data was like and not an intentional setting for the…

anyone else wants to try sherpaOnnx you can try this.. https://github.com/willwade/tts-wrapper we recently added in the kokoro models which should sound a lot better. There are a LOT of models to choose from. I have a feeling the Droid app isnt handling cold starts very well.

Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#235

Post by Twirrim »

keyKeeper wrote: post #197
woadwarrior01 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Okay, what's stopping you from feeding the code into an LLM and re-write it and make it yours? You can even add extra steps like make it analyze the code block by block then supervise it as it is rewriting it. Bam. AI age IP freedom. Morals may stop you but other than that? IMHO all open source code is public domain code if anyone is willing to spend some AI tokens.

That would be a derivative work, and still be subject to the license terms and conditions, at best.

There are standard ways to approach this called clean room engineering.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

One person reads the code and produces a detailed technical specification. Someone reviews it to ensure that there is nothing in there that could be classified as copyrighted material, then a third person (who has never seen the original code) implements the spec.

You could use an LLM at both stages, but you'd have to be able to prove that the LLM that does the implementation had no prior knowledge of the code in question... Which given how LLMs have been trained seems to me to be very dubious territory for now until that legal situation gets resolved.

Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#236

Post by numpad0 »

mayli wrote: post #4

Is this english only?

TTS is generally not multilingual. One might think a well-annotated phonetic descriptions of voices would suffice, but that's not quite how languages work nor how TTS work.

(but somehow LLMs handle multilingual input perfectly fine! that's a bit strange, if you think about that)

Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#237

Post by K0balt »

keyKeeper wrote: post #197
woadwarrior01 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Okay, what's stopping you from feeding the code into an LLM and re-write it and make it yours? You can even add extra steps like make it analyze the code block by block then supervise it as it is rewriting it. Bam. AI age IP freedom. Morals may stop you but other than that? IMHO all open source code is public domain code if anyone is willing to spend some AI tokens.

AI is useful in Chinese walling code, but it’s not as easy as you make it sound. To stay out of legal trouble, you probably should refactor the code into a different language, then back into the target language. In the end, it turns into a process of being forced to understand the codebase and supervising its rewriting. I’ve translated libraries into another language using LLMs, I’d say that process was 1/2 the labor of writing it myself. So in the end, going 2 ways, you may as well rewrite the code yourself… but working with the LLM will make you familiar with the subject matter so you -could- rewrite the code, so I guess you could think of it as a sort of buggy tutorial process?

Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#238

Post by layer8 »

3rd3 wrote: post #189
dr_kiszonka wrote: post #150

Microsoft'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.

You probably mean "e.g." as "for example", not "i.e."? This might be on purpose and part of the training data because "for example" just sounds much better than "e.g.". Presumably for most purposes, linguistic naturalness is more important than fidelity.

Sometimes I use “for example” and “e.g.” in consecutive sentences to not sound repetitive, or possibly even within the same sentence (e.g. in parentheses). In that case, speaking both as “for example” would degrade it linguistically.

In any case, I’d like TTS to not take that kind of artistic freedom.

Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#239

Post by dboreham »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #225
gorgoiler wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would only apply if they were distributing the GPL licensed code alongside their own code. If my MIT-licensed one-line Python library has this line of code… run([“bash”, “-c”, “echo hello”]) …I’m not suddenly subject to bash’s licensing. For anyone wanting to run my stuff though, they’re going to need to make sure they themselves have bash installed. (But, to argue against my own point, if an OS vendor ships my…

GPL is for boomers at this point. Floppy disks? Distribution? You can use a tool but you cant change it? A DLL call means you need to redistribute your code but forking doesn't? Sillyness

GPL post-dates network software distribution (we got our first gcc via ftp).

Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#240

Post by kroaton »

rishav_sharan wrote: post #168

Question for the experts here; What would be a SOTA TTS that can run on an average laptop (32GB RAM, 4GB VRAM). I just want to attach a TTS to my SLM output, and get the highest possible voice quality/ human resembleness.

Try Unmute by Kyutai - https://unmute.sh/
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