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Can it also translate? I have family who would like audiobooks in German but most are in English only.
german is not listed as a supported language, so no. aside from that, i would not want to use computer translation. unlike TTS, which keeps getting better, translation quality still leaves a lot to be desired.
Was just looking for a TTS model to run locally for reading out loud articles, and never heard about Kokoro before! This looks great. I wonder if it can run in the browser somehow - could be a nice WebExtension.
I think most browsers support this already. Even maybe OS wide. I know it should work for Firefox on an article in reader mode. Or in MacOS you can select text and have it read out loud.
Example is Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, the narrator Rob Inglis, makes an amazing voice performance giving depth to environments and characters. And of course the songs!
The word “kokoro” means “heart” in Japanese, which I learned making the (heart shaped and paperback) puzzle books at https://www.kakurokokoro.com/
I'm not sure if that is related here.
Can anyone recommend an open source option that would allow training on a custom voice (my own, so I'd be able to record as many snippets as it needed to train on) to allow me to use it for TTS generation without sharing it off my machine? Edit: I'll wait to see if any recommendations get made here, if not I might give this one a go: https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS
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> On the other, some of my favorite audio books all stood out because the narrator was interpreting the text really well This (and everything else with AI) isn't saying "you don't need good actors any more". It's saying "if you don't have an audiobook, you can make a mediocre one automatically". AI (text, images, videos, whatever) doesn't replace the top end, it replaces the entire bottom-to-middle end.
RIP to future top-enders that would normally have started out on the bottom to middle end.
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Just like printing presses killed the profession of copying books by hand, eliminating the training pathway for illuminated manuscripts. Death of civilization itself I say, damn those printing presses.
Given that the printing press was the root cause for the century of religious wars that soaked Europe with blood, and was key in the revolutions that overthrown absolute monarchies all over Europe, I don't think it's as good as an example as you think it is. Death of a civilization doesn't mean disappearance of mankind or even overall regression on the long term.
All these AI text to voice models seem to ignore emotion. It always sounds like a robot.
Like with almost everything, its an active area of research: https://emosphere-tts.github.io/ We are getting there