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Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

NB: Coqui is no longer actively maintained. I’m not sure what the team is up to now. The open market is definitely in need of an upgraded TTS offering; eleven labs is far ahead at the moment.

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We do maintain a fork, mostly with bug fixes for now: https://github.com/idiap/coqui-ai-TTS PRs welcome :)

Any progress on the license situation? I'd love to work more on it, but worried about it being a bit of a dead end due to uncertainty about the future of the license and not being able to use it in any commercial projects.

> Any progress on the license situation?

What is the situation exactly? Seems to be licensed MPL at a glance, so you're able to use it in commercial projects.

The pretrained models aren’t MPL licensed, though.

Many of them still allow commercial use. The question is most likely about the XTTS model, which doesn't, but its license is up to the original Coqui team.

The licenses of the code (MPL 2.0, allowing commercial use) and the available pretrained models (https://github.com/idiap/coqui-ai-TTS/blob/dev/TTS/.models.j...) are all clearly stated and won't change unless the model owners decide to do so. So the XTTS model is still under CPML, which doesn't allow commercial use.

Not surprising. When I was researching options for a client I tried a few companies including ElevenLabs and Play.ht, each seemed happy to talk to us... except Coqui. I think I went as far as reporting bugs to them, just to have them aggressively ignore me. I guess they're more of a research team than a business?

They were very friendly and welcoming.

The main problem is quality, Eleven labs is so far ahead, even though their API is not very flexible.

Meta's Voicebox is the only other option that feels realistic - but it's for research only for now.

Check out Sonic (cartesia.ai). Great quality, very fast - but with a few kinks to work out (going off the rails on long utterances, random sounds, etc).

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