Hey guys,
So TLDR is elevenlabs / play.ht is WAY too expensive for a realtime chat app, and we need an alternative. Guessing this is why character is rolling their own voice model, & obviously most apps can't do that, so what are the alternatives here?
I've read zero shot prompting for TTS (inserting a sample at runtime) is part of the reason elevenlabs / play is so expensive, wheras finetuning on individual voices like character / OAI did and hosting those as their own model would be way faster and cheaper.
But couqi seems really slow from our finetune testing, even on an h100, and not only that but it's not really... good. Does anyone know why, or there alternatives that chat apps are using? Is anyone working on better open source TTS? This seems totally overlooked compared to text where there's so much competition right now, but is almost just as important. Shocked more people aren't working on this! Thanks
Silero TTS is extremely fast, and combined with RVC you can clone any voice from any person/character. It's a bit monotonous, but it's the best available for free imo.
And if you want the best quality : use the 10000 free words per month of your 11Labs account. Once you run out of it, switch to Silero TTS. In both cases, plug the audio output into the input of a real-time RVC app.