Skip to main content

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.'

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

CRM and AI?

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used in a CRM system to enhance customer service, sales performance, and marketing strategies. Here are some examples of how AI can be applied in a CRM: - AI can enable natural language processing and voice input, such as Siri or Alexa, to allow a CRM system to answer customer queries, solve their problems, and even identify new opportunities for the sales team. Some AI-driven CRM systems can even multitask to handle all these functions and more. - AI can help with sales forecasting by analysing historical data, customer behaviour, and market trends. This can help the sales team make more accurate predictions for future sales figures and determine a success metric. - AI can assist with lead management by automating the process of qualifying and nurturing prospects. It can use chatbots and email bots to understand leads' needs and inform the sales team to improve their performance. With insights gained from these bots, companies can optimise their...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Network Analysis Tool to help identify structural gaps

  InfraNodus is a web-based open source tool and method for generating insight from any text or discourse using text network analysis. The byline on the website states, 'Get an overview of any discourse, reveal the blind spots, enhance your perspective.' which, whilst accurate does little to summarise the potential of such a tool. Watching the introduction helps. Its capabilities include representing any text as a network and identifying the most influential words in a discourse based on the terms' co-occurrence, providing text network visualization and analysis live as new data is added, offering discourse structure analysis to measure the level of bias in discourse and identify structural gaps in discourse, and being available via an API to be used in conjunction with other text mining and analysis software. The white paper, ' Generating Insight Using Text Network Analysis ' concludes:  'The tool is currently used by researchers, marketing professionals, stude...
Post a Comment
Read more