Festival and espeak-ng are the traditional Linux speech synthesizers. Should be available in any repository. And as far as I know they more or less "just" translate the words into phonemes (per complicated rules) and then play those.
Thank you! Oh wow, espeak-ng is way better then Festival, tho it's not that bad itself. Is there a reason to use the latter over the former? I'm only just using these tools for the first time.
Just use what you like, i think they're all fine. Espeak-NG is licensed GPL and according to Wikipedia, the algorithm is (ultimately) from 1995, so I don't think there's funky things going on in there.
Here is the way it used to be done before AI took over, when it was called speech synthesis. How do you know all of these programs were created ethically and responsibly and nobody ever used any pirated software or infringed any patents or copyright? You don't, some people maybe did, but it's probably okay these days.
You can also find reasonably responsibly trained machine learning models that are open and able to run locally. Nobody's going to promise there was never any part of it that was trained on data you wouldn't approve of. There's simply no way to tell. We don't have any system capable of identifying or defining who is consenting or what they are consenting to.
So, you really have to define this line yourself, and you have to understand that nothing's going to be done perfectly ethically without question. If you're willing to compromise a little without having unrealistic expectations, and live in the unfortunate reality that we find ourselves whether we like it or not, you can probably find some free, locally-hosted model that will do a much better and more capable job than any previously mentioned software solution, but you have to accept the risk that even then maybe it's not as ethically trained as it was claimed to be. We don't know, nobody can promise or verify that.
There is no ethical free lunch. If you want to avoid "AI" completely you can try to find and hire a real human being to read to you. Even that's hard, and it's certainly not immune to perpetuating some form of exploitation. We live in a world of exploitation. You can try your best to minimize the harm you do, but the philosophy gets complicated fast.
And to quote "The Good Place": this is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors.
You have a point with all this, but we should all be able to agree that a speech synthesis program made prior to the big AI invasion 1. did not make use of large-scale data scraping, nor were they the product of stealing anyone and everyone's voices without a second thought, and 2. was likely made with much better intentions in mind then anything large companies are pushing currently, and 3. has far less of a negative impact on society and the environment at large. Even if the second one isn't true, what does that mean for all of us? Should we refuse to run a piece of open source software because one singular person on the dev team turned out to be a shithead? That's the direction I see this mindset going. Yes, we all should minimize the harm we do, as I am trying to do right now. I refuse to use any modern-day form of "generative" AI, so I decided to ask a community opposed to AI if there are any older, open source programs that could lend me a helping hand. No, I can't confirm that every single line of code was written with good intentions, but how could anyone, for anything? I'm pretty shocked to see this take on an anti-AI community, because this is one step away from "well, we can't stop it so lets just use it reluctantly instead of searching for other methods" which is the kind of idea that I think rarely holds water.
I'm just a philosopher being criminally open-minded, don't take my navel-gazing too personally. I hate AI so much that it has led me into a nihilistic fugue.
Back in the dos days creative labs had Dr. Sbaitso.
Tbh I think text to speech / speech to text are some of the few genuinely useful things to come out of the last AI boom along with translation. faster, cheaper, better than before.
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.