Just made it an MCP server so claude can tell me when it's done with something :)
It says MIT license but then readme has a separate section on prohibited use that maybe adds restrictions to make it nonfree? Not sure the legal implications here.
If a license says "you may use this, you are prohibited from using this", and I use it, did I break the license?
For voice cloning, pocket tts is walled so I can't tell
It seems like Kokoro is the smaller model, also runs on CPU in real time, and is more open and fine tunable. More scripts and extensions, etc., whereas this is new and doesn't have any fine tuning code yet.
I couldn't tell an audio quality difference.
If it were a big model and was trained on a diverse set of speakers and could remember how to replicate them all, then zero shot is a potentially bigger deal. But this is a tiny model.
I'll try out the zero shot functionality of Pocket TTS and report back.
Btw, I would love to hear from someone (who knows what they're talking about) to clear this up for me. Dealing with potential GPL contamination is a nightmare.
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)
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 wonder what's going wrong in there
- "its noisiest superlative insisted on its being received"
Win10 RTX 5070 Ti
Cool tech demo though!
There's about 1.5B English speakers in the planet.
You pull up a map and start navigation. All the street names are in the local language, and no, transliterating the local names to the English alphabet does not make them understandable when spoken by TTS. And not to mention localised foreign names which then are completely mangled by transliterating them to English.
You pull up a browser, open up an news article in your local language to read during your commute. You now have to reach for a translation model first before passing the data to the English-only TTS software.
You're driving, one of your friends Signals you. Your phone UI is in English, you get a notification (interrupting your Spotify) saying 'Signal message', followed by 5 minutes of gibberish.
But let's say you have a TTS model that supports your local language natively. Well due to the fact that '1.5B English speakers' apparently exist in the planet, many texts in other languages include English or Latin names and words. Now you have the opposite issue -- your TTS software needs to switch to English to pronounce these correctly...
And mind you, these are just very simple use cases for TTS. If you delve into use cases for people with limited sight that experience the entire Internet, and all mobile and desktop applications (often having poor localisation) via TTS you see how mono-lingual TTS is mostly useless and would be switched for a robotic old-school TTS in a flash...
> only that but it's also common to have system language set to English
Ask a German whether their system language is English. Ask a French person. I can go on.
In English, it's perfect and it's so funny in others languages. It sounds exactly like someone who actually doesn't speak the language, but got it anyway.
I don't know why Fantine is just better than the others in others languages. Javer seems to be the worst.
Try Jean in Spanish « ¡Es lo suficientemente pequeño como para caber en tu bolsillo! » sound a lot like they don't understand the language.
Or Azelma in French « C'est suffisament petit pour tenir dans ta poche. » is very good.I mean half of the words are from a Québécois accent, half French one but hey, it's correct French.
Però non capisce l'italiano.
Another recent example: https://github.com/supertone-inc/supertonic
It seems like it is being trained by one person, and it is surprisingly natural for such a small model.
I remember when TTS always meant the most robotic, barely comprehensible voices.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1qcusnt/soprano...