The hardest part still seem to get rid of the synthetic high pitch background noise, I've tried most of the text-to-voice synthesizers and ElevenLabs are still my benchmark.
For example:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WL_5gFswhZncERGzSRh2hQ42RVr...
The trick to exceeding Eleven quality is using multiple speaker prompts, and swapping them in and out over the course of longer texts. Each is a slight variation on the original. If you hand tune the swaps it's super good, but if you just swap in 'beginning of new paragraph' 'continuation speaker' automatically, that alone is a huge boost.
I don't have a clip handy but I will make a YouTube or something this week, because the quality is wild if you do this. There's some passable audio clips on my README here https://github.com/JonathanFly/bark but all those are just using the same speaker for every line. That was all just the first samples I tried, from weeks ago, without really putting any effort into it. You can do a lot better.
The extra expressiveness of Bark does come with it being harder to control and having a bit of a mind of its own at times. (And this can also be very very funny: https://twitter.com/jonathanfly/status/1657658109001596929)
So for a production or real time use case Eleven makes more sense. For example even my best speakers will switch to a new voice mid prompt, once in awhile. (As if the audio clip was from interview segment.)
I'll set it up this weekend and play around with it :)
That's interesting. When I'm judging Bark I'm looking at my own random samples, but for eleven I'm seeing stuff people post on Twitter or YouTube, which I suppose must be cherry-picked. I didn't even realize Eleven did the same thing!