LyingBard

Unfortunately, the way python apps compile means that it has to be compiled on a Mac to work on Macs (it lacks cross-compilation). So you might be out of luck.

I realized I hadn't posted an audio sample from this version yet so here you go! You can definitely hear some Joshua in there which is promising. Hopefully this encourages you to download LyingBard and give it a shot.

pydub\utils.py:170: RuntimeWarning: Couldn't find ffmpeg or avconv - defaulting to ffmpeg, but may not work

and

torch\nn\utils\weight_norm.py:28: UserWarning: torch.nn.utils.weight_norm is deprecated in favor of torch.nn.utils.parametrizations.weight_norm. warnings.warn("torch.nn.utils.weight_norm is deprecated in favor of torch.nn.utils.parametrizations.weight_norm.")

i don't think these are meant to happen

also i did [ model ] > [ show folder ] and pasted in the pretrained voice folders but the program didn't register it as being there. might have to do with the errors above? idk.

Thanks for letting me know about this! I've updated the GitHub with info for this.

So the torch warnings are totally fine (probably should've said something about that).

The pydub warning means you need to install ffmpeg (definitely should've mentioned that). Without ffmpeg it might not be able to play sound or save sound or both or neither. I added instructions to the GitHub on how to install ffmpeg.

The model not showing up is probably because you didn't restart the program. I haven't implemented anything to refresh the model list yet so you just have to restart right now. If that's still not working, send me a screenshot of your folder and the contents of the folder you put in there.

LyingBard is here!!! FOR YOU!!!!

VVVV Instructions and download HERE!!! VVVV

So I've got a version working with all the features for a solid beta, but... only on my computer.

It should work when I set it up with all the cloud nonsense it needs, but it costs money, I don't wanna spend money right now, and I can't really make you pay for a product I'm not sure will work right.

So here's the deal: I'm starting a paid internship soon, so once I have that income I'll be willing to spend money on this. Problem: it's a National Parks internship so I won't have internet or the computer that I make LyingBard with until I get back... in 3-6 months.

But! I also want to ask you an important question...

It should work on phones and it definitely shouldn't crash your phone!

LyingBard has been migrated to an entirely new backend. This took me forever, but I needed to do it.

Everything is basically the same. Main differences are that it now supports user accounts and generations are now saved to disk. This will make the website not crash as much and allow you to access old generations (so long as you make an account).

This is all gearing up for custom speakers coming soon I prommi!

Test it out:

Thanks to everyone sharing LyingBard! And a special thanks to my first donator!

Fans of RTVS may remember Joshua, beautiful baby boy of wayneradiotv. If you're like me, you might be wondering why Joshua stayed dead after LyreBird shut down. Why couldn't he be brought back with a different TTS? The fact is that LyreBird was a product of a very specific time in AI TTS. In March 2017, Google released a paper on Tacotron [1], one of the first AI TTS's with real success. In April 2017, LyreBird began showing off their TTS buisness [2]. As AI bros are wont to do they took that shit. LyreBird is a version of Tacotron. It incorporates technologies that would be published in the next few Tacotron papers [3] including multi-speaker, prosody encoding, and prosody prediction. And in February 2018, Tacotron 2 came out [4].

Tacotron 2 is better in every way. It's faster, better at imitation, and simpler. This makes it much more economical to run and fine-tune on a specific speaker, so every subsequent AI TTS is based off of Tacotron 2.

If you read the paper, Tacotron 1 has a lot of arbitrary and untested choices. It's clear that they published it in a hurry to prove that it could be done, but they hadn't refined it to cut the unnecessary fluff.

This brings me to why I'm writing this. I hope it's clear that I did a lot of research for this. That's because I did my best to recreate LyreBird, named LyingBard, and I've put it up for you to play with here.

You may notice though that it's not quite right. The main reason is that I had to go with a low quality version (reduction factor 5 for those who read the paper). A high quality version would take too long to train with my current set up and I'm almost certain that's what they used.

If I got about $100 in donations, I'm pretty sure I could get a high quality version trained in about a month. It still wouldn't sound exactly the same. Due to the chaotic nature of training a neural network, anything short of getting the actual files off LyreBird (now Descript's) servers won't make it sound exactly the same.

Regardless, LyingBard is here to stay. It's hosted on a free server so I have no reason to take it down. I'll be posting about updates here on this blog. I'm working towards getting custom voices ready at the moment and I've got some ideas for new features and fun toys for the future.

Thanks for reading!

Here's some sources if you wanna learn more about stuff I mentioned:

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.10135

[2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/lyrebird-can-listen-and-copy-any-voice-in-one-minute

[3] https://google.github.io/tacotron/