Bark, the Open Source Text To Speech AI

When you think of Text to Speech in AI terms, the first company you may think of is Eleven Labs as the quality of their product literally speaks for itself. If you are looking for an Open Source tool, then Bark, by Suno may be of interest.

In Hacker News one of the founders of Suno said this of Bark: 'At Suno we work on audio foundation models, creating speech, music, sounds effects etc….

Text to speech was a natural playground for us to share with the community and get some feedback. Given that this model is a full GPT model, the text input is merely a guidance and the model can technically create any audio from scratch even without input text, aka hallucinations or audio continuation.

When used as a TTS model, it’s very different from the awesome high quality TTS models already available. It produces a wider range of audio – that could be a high quality studio recording of an actor or the same text leading to two people shouting in an argument at a noisy bar.'

This tool is already available on Hugging Face (which I'm due to do a blog piece on - the ToDO list is growing) which increases the utility.

The GitHub description states:

'Similar to Vall-E and some other amazing work in the field, Bark uses GPT-style models to generate audio from scratch. Different from Vall-E, the initial text prompt is embedded into high-level semantic tokens without the use of phonemes. It can therefore generalize to arbitrary instructions beyond speech that occur in the training data, such as music lyrics, sound effects or other non-speech sounds. A subsequent second model is used to convert the generated semantic tokens into audio codec tokens to generate the full waveform. To enable the community to use Bark via public code we used the fantastic EnCodec codec from Facebook to act as an audio representation.'

Comments

The AI Dilemma and "Gollem-Class" AIs

From the Center for Humane Technology Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss how existing A.I. capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, how A.I. companies are caught in a race to deploy as quickly as possible without adequate safety measures, and what it would mean to upgrade our institutions to a post-A.I. world. This presentation is from a private gathering in San Francisco on March 9th with leading technologists and decision-makers with the ability to influence the future of large-language model A.I.s. This presentation was given before the launch of GPT-4. One of the more astute critics of the tech industry, Tristan Harris, who has recently given stark evidence to Congress. It is worth watching both of these videos, as the Congress address gives a context of PR industry and it's regular abuses. "If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their

Beware the Orca, the challenge to ChatGPT and Palm2 is here

So Google's 'we have no moat' paper was correct. If you train an LLM wisely then it's cost effective and cheap to produce a small LLM that is able to compete or even beat established, costly LLMs, as Microsoft has just found. It's another excellent video from AI Explained, who goes through some of the training procedures, which I won't get into here. Orca, is a model that learns from large foundation models (LFMs) like GPT-4 and ChatGPT by imitating their reasoning process. Orca uses rich signals such as explanations and complex instructions to improve its performance on various tasks. Orca outperforms other instruction-tuned models and achieves similar results to ChatGPT on zero-shot reasoning benchmarks and professional and academic exams. The paper suggests that learning from explanations is a promising way to enhance model skills. Smaller models are often overestimated in their abilities compared to LFMs, and need more rigorous evaluation methods. Explana

What is happening inside of the black box?

Neel Nanda is involved in Mechanistic Interpretability research at DeepMind, formerly of AnthropicAI, what's fascinating about the research conducted by Nanda is he gets to peer into the Black Box to figure out how different types of AI models work. Anyone concerned with AI should understand how important this is. In this video Nanda discusses some of his findings, including 'induction heads', which turn out to have some vital properties. Induction heads are a type of attention head that allows a language model to learn long-range dependencies in text. They do this by using a simple algorithm to complete token sequences like [A][B] ... [A] -> [B]. For example, if a model is given the sequence "The cat sat on the mat," it can use induction heads to predict that the word "mat" will be followed by the word "the". Induction heads were first discovered in 2022 by a team of researchers at OpenAI. They found that induction heads were present in

Charting the emergence of AGI?

Search This Blog