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Looking for: TTS for fire dispatch (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago by flandish@lemmy.world to c/opensource@programming.dev

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I’m a firefighter who’s also a software engineer and am working on a training app. In it, I have it generating text dispatches of various scenes for us to discuss on rainy slow training days. Such as “Respond to 123 Main st, for a report of a smell of smoke” etc.

I already use google maps to generate a random address and show the map / street view. With the maps api I can domain lock the key…

But with their Text to Speech api I cannot. Seems silly. But I get it.

Are there any alternatives? I would be ok spinning up a middle server to also rework the audio to generate radio static, etc, but first pass I am looking for non-robotic (ie not browser based) TTS.

Thoughts?

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[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

eSpeak is the old favorite. its very robotic, but with a lot of fiddling, you can get the option that will sound like a person.
piper https://noerguerra.com/how-to-read-text-aloud-with-piper-and-python/ is pretty good at mimicking human speach. Still sorta robotic, but can run on just about anything.
https://github.com/suno-ai/bark is hard to work with, but will definitely get you a human sounding voice if that is what you are looking for.

Sometime last year, I was trying to get an open source TTS to generate audiobooks from books that will most likely never get a real person attached. I ended up using piper for it. It was "good enough" for car rides and such. Bark felt kinda like cheating/uncanny valley and would do strange things to the voice after a while.

Hope that helps!

[–] flandish@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

if i read this correctly a piper has webasm bindings too? I am running the training app in a browser as a vue3+ts stack. So I could spin up a worker on cloudflare, api key lock, and then use that or run it all browser side with wasm.

Time to tinker!

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Give it a shot. Its been a full year since ive messed with this so let me know how it goes. Might be some better stuff out now. But yeah piper/eSpeak both have fantastic performance. You can even put it on your phone should the need arise: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.woheller69.ttsengine/

[–] flandish@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

cool! i know cf workers ai can run a tts model and i can domain lock the api key… but this seems cooler. :)

[–] flandish@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

sweet. thanks!