Relevant aside: What is state-of-the-art for real time text to speech?
Most recent papers & projects I've seen are really high quality but are too slow to synthesize speech in real time.
Most recent papers & projects I've seen are really high quality but are too slow to synthesize speech in real time.
There are various other flavours that can deliver faster synthesis (NixTTS comes to mind), but IMO they sacrifice quality even further.
"Good quality" is subjective, obviously. To me, it's perfectly audible, but there's definitely a noticeable difference in quality compared to the heavier diffusion-based models. It's much less crisp and loses some of the more subtle inflections, plosives, etc. For my purposes (language learning), it's fine for the time being but eventually it would be nice to move to a higher-end model.
[0] https://polyvox.app [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.04558 [2] https://github.com/xiph/LPCNet/
I'm sure there are ways to select any text and make my phone read it in any app but I don't need it and I didn't investigate. Actually I don't need it in ebooks too but I know it's there and I checked that it works.