Coqui, a startup providing open speech tech for everyone

https://github.com/coqui-ai

by doener • 5 years ago

174 59 5 years ago

github.com

topicseed• 5 years ago

What is open speech tech? Clicked twice (GitHub, website's homepage) and didn't really get much out of it.

Miraste• 5 years ago

They have text-to-speech software and speech-to-text software, both of which are open source.

amelius• 5 years ago

I'm not sure but in any case they have a great collection of papers and talks in that repository.

totetsu2• 5 years ago

Basically building the tools to collect data, and models to let anyone implement voice interfaces in their system without needing to use a closed api.

andrewfromx3• 5 years ago

I think it’s like https://www.descript.com/

jsnk• 5 years ago

Descript doens't look like it's open source though.

andrewfromx3• 5 years ago

exactly, that's why this is exciting!

resoluteteeth• 5 years ago

In case it helps clarify what this is, I think the reason this is getting posted is because it was discussed earlier as a continuation of Mozilla's TTS work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26790281

explorigin• 5 years ago

I'm glad to see this. I hope they can get the TTS to sound more conversational and less like a newscaster...that being said...free is nice.

indigochill• 5 years ago

The quality is also miles better than the last open source TTS I've heard that wasn't just an Amazon SDK. I'll take newscaster-voice over robot-from-the-early-00's.

EMM_386• 5 years ago

The sample links are impressive to me. I don't follow the space closely but they sound conversational.

https://soundcloud.com/user-565970875/pocket-article-wavernn...

nitrogen• 5 years ago

Usually conversation is less crisp. That sounds great, but more like an audiobook or NPR. It's probably going to be hard to sound conversational with only one voice speaking though.

kdavis2• 5 years ago

Some samples of the TTS voice are here[1]

[1] https://erogol.github.io/ddc-samples/

trowngon2• 5 years ago

Looks like a fork of Mozilla DeepSpeech by former DeepSpeech developers. What is the relation to the original project?

basaltbeach2• 5 years ago

tl;dr:

- Mozilla fired the developers and mothballed the project

- But wants to keep it around as a museum piece

All ongoing development is happening in the fork.

totetsu2• 5 years ago

I was very sad when that happened. There were a lot of language communities organizing their efforts around that project too.

caddemon3• 5 years ago

Nothing to do with the tech, but I love your name! I'm just a tourist in Puerto Rico but I've been a number of times and it always warms my heart to hear the Coqui frogs at night. I even play the recordings at home sometimes if I'm having trouble falling asleep.

For anyone that hasn't heard of Coqui frogs before, they are pretty cool animals. Little guys, but a single one can be surprisingly loud and throw its voice pretty effectively. AFAIK they're only really found in Puerto Rico - apparently they can survive in other warm climates but will not sing? Maybe that's an urban legend though.

Anyway I know the sound is a little contentious (some hotels get cats to cut down on guest complaints about the Coqui) but I'd recommend checking it out: https://musicofnature.com/coqui-magic-nightscapes/

icedchai• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, it is a bad name because, right or wrong, it will be easily mispronounced. Cocky AI? Who wants that?

rhn_mk1• 5 years ago

The computing industry could get less sensitive and accept that other languages than English exist.

spoonjim• 5 years ago

Kind of an Americentric perspective and also doesn't give people the benefit of the doubt. I'm an American who only speaks English but I think it's an awesome and interesting name compared to most of the lame product names out there.

bloak• 5 years ago

It will definitely be mispronounced if they misspell it without the accent (Coquí).

I understand they don't want non-ascii in the GitHub project name that turns into a directory name, but the one-line description contains an emoji so I would have thought they could have allowed themselves a Latin-1 character there, for the benefit of people who know some Spanish but hadn't heard of the frogs.

Vivtek• 5 years ago

I live in Adjuntas and no amount of cats would eat this many frogs - fortunately!

They tend to quiet down during dry spells, so our rain last week has made things sound much nicer.

bradknowles• 5 years ago

Oh, god. I took a vacation to Hawaii a few years ago. The damn Coqui frogs would never shut up. You lost sleep, because you couldn’t shut them out. People have died because they ran off the road while driving, due to lack of sleep caused by Coqui frogs.

Please kill all the Coqui frogs in the world. Or, at least imprison them all on an island that has no human habitation.

Sure, it’s cute in small quantities, but if that’s your soundtrack 24x7 at 70-80 decibels or more, non-stop, you’d probably want to commit suicide just to get out of there. That’s the kind of place that Coqui frogs drive you to.

rafaeltorres• 5 years ago

Just a note: the colorful frog pictured on the website (https://coqui.ai/) is not a coqui. Coquis are usually brown and tiny. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Coqui_Fr...

pabs36• 5 years ago

Is there any information about the training process? Which data was used, which license was that data under and which tools, drivers and hardware was used for the training?

Basically I'm wondering if these projects count as libre machine learning projects according to the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning Policy.

https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy

ftyers8• 5 years ago

They do, the issue is with Tensorflow support iirc and with NVIDIA drivers.

So for the English model they use mostly free/open-source data, but some non-free data:

- train_files Fisher, LibriSpeech, Switchboard, Common Voice English, and approximately 1700 hours of transcribed WAMU (NPR) radio shows explicitly licensed to use as training corpora. (from https://github.com/coqui-ai/STT/releases/tag/v0.9.3)

As for the hardware for training... it's basically NVIDIA (you need Tensorflow / CUDA and all that guff). For inference it works realtime on a CPU.

I'm preparing pretrained models based on Common Voice data for their STT based on Common Voice data here: https://tepozcatl.omnilingo.cc/manifest.html

There is plenty of free/open-source voice data out there, just it's a question of reaching for a sick bag and installing NVIDIAs stuff.

I don't know if they'd count as free/open-source according to Debian (I'm a Debian user myself), but the team has definitely talked about getting into Debian and would be very open to discussions about it.

pabs36• 5 years ago

Check out the ML policy, it sounds like it would currently be classified as a "toxic candy" model due to the non-free data, but it sounds like you could re-train to avoid that.

Using CUDA also means it wouldn't be considered legitimately free enough, although folks are working on getting AMD ROCm into Debian.

Tensorflow isn't yet in Debian, but there may be folks working on it.

Another problem is that Debian doesn't have the hardware for doing training.

I'd encourage you to talk to the folks on the debian-ai mailing list and IRC channel to discuss these and other issues.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-ai/ ircs://irc.oftc.net/debian-ai

hutzlibu• 5 years ago

"There is plenty of free/open-source voice data out there"

No doubt about that, but you need validated transcripted voice data(no errors) and this is harder to get.

edoceo3• 5 years ago

how do I actually use this to turn my speech into text? it seems some docs are 404ing.

edit: I found some transcription code:

https://github.com/WebThingsIO/voice-addon

DeepSpeech based but close, workable.

ftyers8• 5 years ago

There is a lot of example code here: https://github.com/coqui-ai/STT-examples

If you have any more specific requirements then we can point you in the right direction. Or just join us on Matrix: https://app.element.io/#/room/#coqui-ai_STT:gitter.im :)

edoceo3• 5 years ago

I want to yell at some webpage that is reading my mobile's mic and have it become text in a <textarea>.

And I don't want the company that must not be named to know what I said.

Rebelgecko2• 5 years ago

This seems neat, but I wish they had more examples of how to use it as a library. Most of their tutorials seem focused on training new models

kdavis2• 5 years ago

There is a repository with STT examples[1]. Is what you're looking for there?

[1] https://github.com/coqui-ai/STT-examples

Rebelgecko2• 5 years ago

If I'm parsing the acronyms right, that's speech-to-text and I was hoping to try out their Text-to-Speech

rytill• 5 years ago

How does this startup plan to make money? Services?

throwaway99x99• 5 years ago

Wow, that soundcloud sample is amazing. I wonder how long it took to produce it or if it could be produced in real time?

ftyers8• 5 years ago

Iirc it is realtime, but check out the Matrix channel: https://app.element.io/#/room/#coqui-ai_TTS:gitter.im

pabs36• 5 years ago

It would be awesome if this could be integrated into GNOME, KDE and the other open desktops as an accessibility feature.

barnaclejive• 5 years ago

Cocky? Might want to consider a rename before you run into the Coq situation.

Coqui, a startup providing open speech tech for everyone

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