Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice

Eep.

So, on my M1 mac, did `uvx pocket-tts serve`. Plugged in

> It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only

(Beginning of Tale of Two Cities)

but the problem is Javert skips over parts of sentences! Eg, it starts:

> "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, ..."

Notice how it skips over "it was the age of foolishness,", "it was the winter of despair,"

Which... Doesn't exactly inspire faith in a TTS system.

(Marius seems better; posted https://github.com/kyutai-labs/pocket-tts/issues/38)

I'm Martian so everything you create better support my language on day 1

If memory serves, the license is the ultimate source of truth on what is allowed or not. You cannot add some section that isn't in the text of the license (at least in the US and other countries that use similar legal systems) on some website and expect it to hold up in court because the license doesn't include that text. I know of a few other bigger-name projects that try to pull these kinds of stunts because they don't believe anyone is going to actually read the text of the license.

Uh, no? This is not at all an absurd requirement? Screen readers literally do this all the time, with voices that are the classic way of making a speech synthesizer, no AI required. ESpeak is an example, or MS OneCore. The NVDA screen reader has an option for automatic language switching as does pretty much every other modern screen reader in existence. And absolutely none of these use AI models to do that switching, either.

Perhaps I have been not talking to voice models that much or the chatgpt voice always felt weird and off because I was thinking it goes to a cloud server and everything but from Pocket TTS I discovered unmute.sh which is open source and I think is from the same company as Pocket TTS/can I think use Pocket TTS as well

I saw some agentic models at 4B or similar which can punch above its weights or even some basic models. I can definitely see them in the context of home lab without costing too much money.

I think atleast unmute.sh is similar/competed with chatgpt's voice model. It's crazy how good and (effective) open source models are from top to bottom. There's basically just about anything for almost everyone.

I feel like the only true moat might exist in coding models. Some are pretty good but its the only industry where people might pay 10x-20x more for the best (minimax/z.ai subscription fees vs claude code)

It will be interesting to see if we will see another deepseek moment in AI which might beat claude sonnet or similar. I think Deepseek has deepseek 4 so it will be interesting to see how/if it can beat sonnet

(Sorry for going offtopic)