I tried it. Not bad for the size (of the model) and speed. Once you install all the massive number of libraries and things needed we are a far cry away from 25MB though. Cool project nonetheless.
Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
91–100 of 383 posts
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Not open source. "You will need internet connectivity to validate your AccessKey with Picovoice license servers ... If you wish to increase your limits, you can purchase a subscription plan." https://github.com/Picovoice/orca#accesskey
The guy is just spamming the project in a lot of comments.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#93I tried it. Not bad for the size (of the model) and speed. Once you install all the massive number of libraries and things needed we are a far cry away from 25MB though. Cool project nonetheless.
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.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#94Web version: https://clowerweb.github.io/kitten-tts-web-demo/ It sounds ok, but impressive for the size.
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)
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#95Earlier 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.
A robotic, explicitly non-natural voice would be perfectly acceptable, and even desirable, in many situations[...]it'd be enough is the speech if easy to recognize. We've had formant synths for several decades, and they're perfectly understandable and require a tiny amount of computing power, but people tend not to want to listen to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth https://simulationcorner…
SAM and the way it works is not what people typically associate with the term "formant synthesizer."
DECtalk[1,2] would be a much better example, that's as formant as you get.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECtalk [2] https://webspeak.terminal.ink
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#96I don't mind so much the size in MB, the fact that it's pure CPU and the quality, what I do mind however is the latency. I hope it's fast. Aside: Are there any models for understanding voice to text, fully offline, without training? I will be very impressed when we will be able to have a conversation with an AI at a natural rate and not "probe, space, response"
Nvidia's parakeet https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2 appears to be state of the art for english: 10x faster than Whisper.
My mid-range AMD CPU is multiple times faster than realtime with parakeet.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#97Most of these comments were originally posted to a different thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44806543 ). I've moved them hither because on HN we always prefer to give the project creators credit for their work. (it does however explain how many of these comments are older than the thread they are now children of)
[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#98The 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…
A Festival's English model, festvox-kallpc16k, is about 6 MB, and it is a large model; festvox-kallpc8k is about 3.5 MB. eSpeak NG's data files take about 12 MB (multi-lingual). I guess this one may generate more natural-sounding speech, but older or lower-end computers were capable of decent speech synthesis previously as well.
Custom voices could be added, but the speed was more important to some users.
$ ls -lh /usr/bin/flite
Listed as 27K last I checked.
I recall some Blind users were able to decode Gordon 8-bit dialogue at speeds most people found incomprehensible. =3
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#99The 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…
[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#100Can you run it in reverse for speech recognition?
no, but whisper has a 39M model: https://github.com/openai/whisper