It’s also worth remember that “AI voices” don’t always mean tts. RVC is also rising technology: you just need a single modder with decent skills in voice acting, and he/she can make act the whole cast of characters (man/woman, young/adult etc.)
In this case, Google did look more shady than Apple because there were reports of Google pushing developer to not publish on other Android’s store (which is an illegal anti-competive practice Google operate on some of its platform like Youtube etc.). Apple didn’t need to employ such practices because alternative stores on iOS are nearly impossible.
The current problem with running these AI on local hardware is that, as supposedly tiny tools, they require huge packages to download and often require specific version of Python (3.8 while most modern Linux distro come with 3.10+) and most of the time you’re required to make these massive download (+6GiB of libraries, pip packages and various dependencies/sdk)… just to give one single try. If you mess with something, it’s all over again.
What I’ve found more useful, is using huggingface.I was forgetting about Bark! thanks for remind me… luckily is already available on hugface here
…after being feedup with elevenlabs (popular TTS service) I choose to use a different route.
TTS is made with ttspeaker… and then added a bit of “flavor” by passing the output to a RVC model to give the newscaster a more poignant flavor. Let me know what you think about.
(also I am planning to change the newscaster model)