[HN Gopher] TTS still sucks
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TTS still sucks
Author : speckx
Score : 31 points
Date : 2025-11-10 21:37 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (duarteocarmo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (duarteocarmo.com)
| skybrian wrote:
| ...if you care about voice cloning.
|
| Maybe that's not so important?
| lxe wrote:
| That's because you're sleeping on things like Higgs Audio
| meatmanek wrote:
| If this demo video[1] is indicative of what you can expect, I'm
| not particularly impressed. For me, every single one of the
| recordings fell all the way to the bottom of the uncanny
| valley.
|
| 1. https://github.com/user-
| attachments/assets/0fd73fad-097f-48a...
| hackingonempty wrote:
| I would think the only way to fairly evaluate the performance
| of these models as they approach that of professional human
| voice actors is to evaluate them against humans in a
| sufficiently powered randomly controlled and blinded trial.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| A big caveat of this is that the author is just looking at a
| ranking of open models? It's just buried in a little sentence in
| there but makes a big difference to model quality. Kokoro in the
| overall rankings is only 15, so if #15 is what you consider the
| "best model" you need to be cognizant that you are leaving
| performance on the table.
|
| I've heard a lot of Substacks voiced by Eleven Labs models and
| they seem fine (with the occasional weirdness around a proper
| noun.) Not a bad article but I think more examples of TTS usage
| would be more useful.
|
| I guess the outcome is, open weight TTS models are only okay and
| could be a lot better?
| regulation_d wrote:
| Yeah, from my experience the more helpful conclusion is "TTS is
| not commoditized yet". At some point in the next 5 years,
| convincing TTS will be table stakes. But for now, paying for
| TTS gets you better results.
| thorum wrote:
| Closed models seem close to solving TTS entirely. Suno AI sings
| better than most human vocalists. Sora 2 struggles with timing
| the flow of conversations, but at the sentence level it's
| extremely good.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| The paid models are still too expensive for personal long-form
| use-cases. For example: if I want to generate an audiobook from
| a web novel, the price can go as high as thousands of dollars.
| If I'm just a regular reader (not the author), that's
| prohibitively expensive for someone who just wants to enjoy the
| story in a different medium.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Despite ElevenLabs API usage being expensive, ElevenReader is
| $11 a month for unlimited personal long-form content.
|
| Even with a local model and hardware you already own, you're
| not beating that on electricity costs.
| huskyr wrote:
| Yup, ElevenLabs stills rules pretty much in this space.
| Especially if you're looking for non-English models it's really
| hard to find anything good although the latest Chatterbox[1]
| now supports 23 languages.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/resemble-ai/chatterbox
| fleshmonad wrote:
| It's very interesting to see that there actually are people who
| want to automatically create a "podcast" from their blog using
| their cloned voice. Is this just what tech bro culture does to
| someone? Or is it about hustling and grinding while getting your
| very important word out there. I mean over time one would
| certainly save up to 20 minutes for each article...
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Exactly! Why would I want to listen to a written article
| instead of just reading it?
|
| Also, I suspect these AI-Podcast blogs are probably just
| generated with AI too, so it's likely safe to skip the whole
| mess
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| For me it would be when I'm driving or working out. But I
| can't imagine listening to an AI generated podcast. I do
| listen to the Stratechery podcast that is the same as the
| email.
|
| But he also not only reads it himself, he has someone else
| narrate quotes and he uses chapter art that goes along with
| the article.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| To some degree, you could make the same argument about
| written books and audio books. Mostly I listen to audiobooks
| because I'm often bored in the car and learning something
| seems like a good use of my time.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Wait till you get old and have trouble reading.
| imiric wrote:
| > Anything over 1000 characters starts hallucinating.
|
| So just feed it batches smaller than 1000 characters? It's not
| like TTS requires maintaining large contexts at a time.
| simlevesque wrote:
| Context helps guessing what the next word will be.
| zahlman wrote:
| If you've been given 1000 characters (a fairly long
| paragraph) of text to read (and supposing you get to study
| them before you start speaking), is "guessing what the next
| word will be" all that relevant to decisions about
| intonation?
| tonyarkles wrote:
| With no significant background in ML-based TTS, I'm assuming
| that a larger context window would help with tone as well.
| "We are gathered here today to mourn the loss of..." really
| provides context into how the whole thing might sound, even
| if most of it is singing the praises of the deceased.
| superkuh wrote:
| For local TTS for a podcast I'd try the quantized .gguf versions
| of Microsoft VibeVoice large in comfyui to clone my voice from a
| ~30 second speech sample the apply it to marked-up text of the
| desired podcast. But it'd be nowhere near real time and require
| dedicating a $300 GPU to it. And the quantized version often goes
| off the rails and loses consistency in voice tone or accent. So
| just one run often isn't enough and I you have to piece the good
| parts of many separate runs together. It's not set it and forget
| it.
|
| I do a lot of desktop screen-reader and pdf/doc/epub/etc text to
| speech every single day. It's been 20 years and I still use
| Festival 1.96 TTS with voice_nitech_us_slt_arctic_hts voice
| because it's so computational cheap and just slightly a step
| about normal festival/espeak/mbrolla/etc type TTS quality to be
| clear and tolerable. In terms of this local "do screenreader
| stuff really fast" use case I've tried modern TTS like vibevoice,
| kokoro tts, sherpa-onx, piper tts, orpheus tts, etc. And they all
| have consistency issues, many are way too slow even with a $300
| GPU dedicated to them, and most output weird garble noises at
| unpredictable times along with the good output.
| derac wrote:
| In my experience, VibeVoice is quite good as well. Even the
| smaller model.
| vahid4m wrote:
| >I do a lot of desktop screen-reader and pdf/doc/epub/etc text
| to speech every single day.
|
| I've been working a product called WithAudio
| (https://with.audio). Are you open to me reaching out and give
| a free license so you can use it and let me know what you think
| ? I should say it only supports Windows and Mac(arm). I'm
| looking for people who have used similar products to get their
| feedback.
| mcny wrote:
| Slightly off-topic but Why would a blog of all things have DRM
| content that I need to enable?
| jsheard wrote:
| It looks like the inline Apple Podcasts player is causing that,
| though it's not clear _why_ since it 's loading an unencrypted
| MP3 directly from the authors S3 bucket. I guess their player
| eagerly sets up DRM playback at startup rather than waiting
| until it's needed, or they're using EME for something else
| (fingerprinting?).
| observationist wrote:
| Superhuman TTS is well within the capabilities of the big AI
| labs. Even Google had voice indistinguishable from human back in
| 2017, but they deliberately kneecapped it because of the
| potential for misuse. Boomers and older folks are not culturally
| or mentally equipped to handle it - even the crappy open source
| voice cloning we had in 2019 got used to scam people into buying
| gift cards.
|
| Because of the potential for abuse, nobody wants to release a
| truly good, general model, because it makes lawyers lose sleep. A
| few more generations of hardware, though, and there will be
| enough open data and DIY scaffolding out there to produce a
| superhuman model, and someone will release it.
|
| Deepfake video is already indistinguishable from real video (not
| oneshot prompt video generation, but deliberate skilled craft
| using AI tools.)
|
| Higgsfield and other tools allow for spectacular voice results,
| but it takes craft and care. The oneshot stuff is deliberately
| underpowered. OpenAI doesn't want to be responsible for a viral
| pitch-perfect campaign ad, or fake scandal video sinking a
| politician, for example.
|
| Once the lawyers calm down, or we get a decent digital bill of
| rights that establishes clear accountability on the user of the
| tool, and not the toolmaker, things should get better. Until
| then, look for the rogue YOLO boutique services or the ambitious
| open source crew to be the first to superhuman, widely available
| TTS.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Stop blaming us old people for your lack of good TTS models.
| onedognight wrote:
| Username checks out.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| > Boomers and older folks are not culturally or mentally
| equipped to handle it
|
| I think a _lot_ of younger people are also not mentally
| equipped to handle it. Outside of the hackernews sphere of
| influence, people are really bad at spotting AI slop (and also
| really bad at _caring_ about it)
| tonyarkles wrote:
| Half tongue in cheek when I say this... that might be true,
| but what are the odds of them actually answering a phone
| call?
| bsder wrote:
| > people are really bad at spotting AI slop
|
| Erm, guilty as charged? Although, I don't think you can blame
| people for that.
|
| There was a video recently comparing a bunch of "influencer
| girls" that had signs of "This is AI" and "This is Real".
| They could all have been AI or could all have been real. I
| have _zero_ confidence that I could actually spot the
| difference.
|
| This is doubly true as an "Online Video Persona" has a bunch
| of idiosyncrasies that make them slightly ... off ... even if
| they're real (example: YouTube Thumbnail Face, face filters,
| etc.). AI is _really_ good at twigging into those
| idiosyncrasies and it serves as nice camouflage for AI
| weirdness.
| munk-a wrote:
| > Boomers and older folks are not culturally or mentally
| equipped to handle it
|
| I'm glad you mentioned this because the "Grandma - I was
| arrested and you need to send bail" scams are already
| ridiculously effective to run. Better TTS will make voice
| communication without some additional verification completely
| untrustworthy.
|
| But, also, I don't want better TTS. I can understand the words
| current robotic TTS is saying so it's doing the job it needs to
| do. Right now there are useful ways to use TTS that provide
| real value to society - better TTS would just enable better
| cloaking of TTS and allow actors to more effectively waste
| human time. I would be perfectly happy if TTS remained at the
| level it is today.
| jsheard wrote:
| What does it even mean for a TTS model to be "superhuman" when
| their goal is to imitate human speech? The AI will somehow...
| unlock a transcendent form of speech never before known to
| mankind?
| observationist wrote:
| A single model that can produce voices indistinguishable from
| human speech, cloning any voice perfectly, and produce audio
| faster than a human can. Superhuman specifically in the
| capability to be faster - minutes of pitch perfect voice per
| second of operation, for example.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Commercial TTS mostly sucks too.
|
| There's flashes of brilliance but most of it is noticeably
| computer generated.
| horhay wrote:
| The Gemini models and Eleven V3, and whatever internal audio
| model Sora 2 uses are about neck and neck in converging
| performance. They have some unexplainable flavor to them
| though. Especially Sora.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| While it sounds like this blogger doesn't want to bother (and
| perhaps experimenting with AI is itself the appeal), I personally
| appreciate when authors read their posts instead of delegating
| the task to AI.
| neilv wrote:
| > _After filtering by my stupid rule of open models,_
|
| That's a good rule.
|
| > _You must enable DRM to play some audio or video on this page._
|
| Looks like `embed.podcasts.apple.com` isn't in the same spirit.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >However, like many models in this leaderboard - I can't use it -
| since it doesn't support voice cloning.
|
| That's such a strange requirement. A TTS is just that. It takes a
| text and speaks it out loud. The user generally doesn't care
| whose voice it is, and personally I think TTS's sharing the same
| voice is a good thing for authenticity since it lets users know
| that it's a TTS reading the script and not a real person.
|
| You want your voice to be reading the script, but you don't want
| to personally record yourself reading the text? As far as I'm
| concerned that's an edge case. No wonder that TTS's can't do that
| properly since most people don't need that in first place.
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