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Less licensing headache, it seems. Kokoro says its Apache licensed. But it has eSpeak-NG as a dependency, which is GPL, which brings into question whether or not Kokoro is actually GPL. PocketTTS doesn't have eSpeak-NG as a dependency so you don't need to worry about all that BS.

Btw, I would love to hear from someone (who knows what they're talking about) to clear this up for me. Dealing with potential GPL contamination is a nightmare.

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Kokoro only uses Espeak for text-to-phoneme (AKA G2P) conversion.

If you could find another compatible converter, you could probably replace eSpeak with it. The data could be a bit OOD, so you may need to fiddle with it, but it should work.

Because the GPL is outdated and doesn't really consider modern gen AI, what you could also do is to generate a bunch of text-to-phoneme pairs with Espeak and train your own transformer on them,. This would free you from the GPL license completely, and the task is easy enough that even a very small model should be able to do it.

If it depends on espeak NG code, the complete product is 100% GPL. That said, if you are able to change the code to take off the espeak dependency then the rest would revert to non-GPL (or even if it's a build time option that you can disable like FFMPEG with --enable-gpl)

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