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.
For reference, the MIT license contains this text: "Permission is hereby granted... to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use". So the README containing a "Prohibited Use" section definitely creates a conflicting statement.
Oh this is sweet, thanks for sharing! I've been a huge fan of Kokoro and event setup my own fully-local voice assistant [1]. Will definitely give Pocket TTS a go!
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 echo this. For a TTS system to be in any way useful outside the tiny population of the world that speaks exclusively English, it must be multilingual and dynamically switch between languages pretty much per word.
That's a pretty crazy requirement for something to be "useful" especially something that runs so efficiently on cpu. Many content creators from non-english speaking countries can benefit from this type of release by translating transcripts of their content to english and then running it through a model like this to dub their videos in a language that can reach many more people.
You mean youtubers? And have to (manually) synchronise the text to their video, and especially when youtube apparently offers voice-voice translation out of the box to mine and many others' annoyance?
But it wouldn't be for those who "speak exclusively English", rather, for those who speak English. Not only that but it's also common to have system language set to English, even if one's language is different.
There's about 1.5B English speakers in the planet.
Let's indeed limit the use case to the system language, let's say of a mobile phone.
You pull up a map. 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.
You pull up a browser, open up an article to read during your commute in your local language. 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.
I love that everyone is making their own TTS model as they are not as expensive as many other models to train. Also there are plenty of different architecture.
>If you want access to the model with voice cloning, go to https://huggingface.co/kyutai/pocket-tts and accept the terms, then make sure you're logged in locally with `uvx hf auth login`
lol
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?
Just made it an MCP server so claude can tell me when it's done with something :)
https://github.com/Marviel/speak_when_done
[1] https://github.com/acatovic/ova
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.
Cool tech demo though!
There's about 1.5B English speakers in the planet.
You pull up a map. 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.
You pull up a browser, open up an article to read during your commute in your local language. 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.
Another recent example: https://github.com/supertone-inc/supertonic
https://huggingface.co/spaces/Supertone/supertonic-2
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...
https://huggingface.co/ekwek/Soprano-1.1-80M