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example.com20 points · 7 comments · 19 hours ago · Gcarter08
Since 2021, I’ve been collecting fully consented voice data from over 20,000 people, 1M audio recordings, and over 1,800 hrs of audio captured to date. For this model, I used a small part of the data, 136 hrs, to finetune Maya1 and expand it’s capabilities.
Hurston-1 is a narrowband TTS model that focuses the output on telephone use because that is still where most of these voices will be heard. I’ve used it to support customers such as Amazon and Salesforce and generated over half-mill revenue with it. Now I’m open sourcing it to help unlock opportunities for others as well.
Limitations: this model doesn’t maintain the exact same voice across prompts and doesn’t support voice cloning. For many use cases, this is fine but maybe not so - if you’re creating podcasts.
This is the first release - I’m already working on the next version with improvements.
I would appreciate, if anyone is interested in this space, download the model from huggingface, check it out and let me know any feedback. Also, open to connecting with others in this space as well.
someperson
fractorial
trollbridge
alephnerd
That said, my hunch is your Africa speicifc datasets might lossy, as entire regions of Africa are very linguistically diverse and someone who speaks Bambara and French will affect a different English accent than someone who speaks Maninka and English.
likoya
But tangentially related, for non-English languages of the African continent, the Gates Foundation are pledging some grants to improve AI access outside of English-speaking regions: https://news.bpdata.com/article/gates-foundation-pledges-1-b...
Despite being focused on English, your project could be of interest for their funding. It's probably worth reaching out to let them know about your work.