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Comment by prophesi | Hacker News Reader

Before Lyrebird was bought by Descript, this was a simple API endpoint. You could generate short MP3's of your digital voice reading any text of your choosing, for free.

I used it extensively in one of my projects, only to find everything broken after leaving it alone for a few months.

All of that to say, are there any alternatives out there HN knows of?

This isn't an attack on Descript, either. The Lyrebird purchase made a lot of sense, and they've built an amazing product with the technology.

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Hey, founder of Resemble (https://resemble.ai) here. We're building a custom voice cloning service with APIs and controllability. Shoot me a message if you want to build a voice from raw MP3s.

Wow, this is perfect! It even has a Unity plugin. I'll certainly give Resemble a whirl.

That's great! I'm glad to see any competition in the space. When I first tried Lyrebird a year or 18 months ago the quality wasn't great. It was OK and I could hear a resemblance to the voice it was meant to create, but there were hisses and fuzzy sections and it just wasn't long term listenable. Recently the examples I've heard from Descript have sounded really crisp. Keep on the path you're on! I like your business model better, but from the examples on your website the voices are still not quite as refined. Now what I'd really like is a local means of generating great TTS of my own voice, but that's a different offering.

Zohaib and I can always be found on these threads :)

The two main non Google/Amazon competitors are https://www.resemble.ai/ and https://replicastudios.com/

Hey! Lyrebird founder here! The simple API endpoint is work in progress. Please fill this form to get an early access: https://descript.typeform.com/to/Phn5zATR

Thanks kundan2510! I sent in a submission. Your API endpoint worked really well for me in the past, so your service will certainly take precedence.

Yes, I see to register and install you agree to these TOCs: https://www.descript.com/terms

Not the worst I have ever seen, but it is pretty clear that they will be using everything you do to improve their product, which doesn't seem absurd, given that you get to use it for free. But it might make you think twice about having it say anything you wouldn't want stored forever / passed around the office.

Hey Prophesi, on Replica (https://replicastudios.com/) you can generate voices from our stock library for free, and of course you can create your own Replica voice too.

If you have more audio data you would want to upload to improve the quality of the voice, you can also get in contact with the team and they will help you out!

You can also access your own voice via the API as well as other stock voices.

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