Speaking tech devices and voice based smart assistants are very popular ourdays. But for providing nice sounding TTS lot of projects depend on big tech cloud services for synthezing voice. While quality is quite good, there remain critical aspects like **privacy concerns** and **missing offline availablitiy**.
# Please read some personal words before using dataset / TTS models
> I contribute my voice as a person believing in a world where all people are equal. No matter of gender, sexual orientation, religion, skin color and geocoordinates of birth location. A global world where everybody is warmly welcome on any place on this planet and open and free knowledge and education is available to everyone. :earth_africa:
### NEW RECORDING-IN-PROGRESS SNEAK PREVIEW OOPS PREHEAR :speaking_head: :construction: :microphone:
I am currently recording a new neutral dataset on a new corpus. This time with BETTER MICROPHONE, BETTER ROOM SITUATION, MORE NATURAL SPEECH FLOW right from the beginning. I've just recorded 8.000 recordings (much recording work remaining) but i share this dataset with you. Any feedback on quality, understandability or naturalness is highly appreciated and i can adjust my recording voice on furher recordings.
To get an impression what my voice sounds to decide if it fits to your project i published some sample recordings, so no need to download complete dataset first.
If you wanna use just a dataset subset (phase1 and/or phase2 and/or phase3) you can see which files belong to which recording phase in [recording quality](./RecordingQuality.csv) csv file.
| thorsten-de-v02 | Normalized to -24dB and split metadata.csv into shuffeled metadata_train.csv and metadata_val.csv | 2020-08-22 | [Google Drive Download v02](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mGWfG0s2V2TEg-AI2m85tze1m4pyeM7b/view?usp=sharing) |
| thorsten-de-v03 | Based on v02 dataset, but with increased speed by 10% (using ffmpeg atempo=1.1). | 2021-02-10 | [Google Drive Download v03](https://drive.google.com/file/d/134_UramfCRoAxRrOnhbPJ2YHHTwxRtr-/view?usp=sharing) |
> All emotional recordings where recorded by myself and i tried to feel and pronounce that emotion even if the phrase context does not match that emotion. Example: I pronounced the sleepy recordings in the tone i have shortly before falling asleep.
You can use a free A-GPL licensed models trained on this dataset via the [silero-models](https://github.com/snakers4/silero-models) project. The full list of models including their older version is available via this [yaml file](https://github.com/snakers4/silero-models/blob/master/models.yml).
| thorsten_8khz | m | de | [8000](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mpQCK5E_IqhcSurnYuGePJiJWL4ZL08z?usp=sharing) / [16000](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tR6w4kgRS2JJ1TWZhwoFuU04Xkgo6YAs?usp=sharing) | [](https://colab.research.google.com/github/snakers4/silero-models/blob/master/examples_tts.ipynb) |
| thorsten_16khz | m | de | [8000](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mpQCK5E_IqhcSurnYuGePJiJWL4ZL08z?usp=sharing) / [16000](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tR6w4kgRS2JJ1TWZhwoFuU04Xkgo6YAs?usp=sharing) | [](https://colab.research.google.com/github/snakers4/silero-models/blob/master/examples_tts.ipynb) |
[ZDisket](https://github.com/ZDisket/) made a tool called [TensorVox](https://github.com/ZDisket/TensorVox) for setting up an TTS environment on Windows easily and included the german TTS model trained by [monatis](https://github.com/monatis/german-tts). Thanks for sharing that :thumbsup:. You can find more details on how to set up [here](https://github.com/ZDisket/TensorVox) or see it live in action on [Youtube](https://youtu.be/tY6_xZnkv-A).
> I really want to bring the topic "OpenVoice" to a bigger public attention, so i am happy to be invited as a speaker on that.
I have been part of a Linux User Group podcast about Mycroft AI and talked on my TTS efforts on that in May 2021. I'll publish a link to that talk when it's released to the public.
In addition to that i was invited by [Yusuf](https://github.com/monatis/) from Turkish tensorflow community to talk on "How to make machines speak with your own voice" on june 2nd, 2021. This talk has been streamed live on Youtube and is available [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Uwb-Bg144&t=2303s).
If you're interested on the showed slides, feel free to download my presentation [here](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ynnw0ilKV3WwMSJHytrN3GXRiFr8x3r0DUimBm1y0LI/edit?usp=sharing)
Whenever i've something about open voice in mind what i like to share my thoughts on i post a video on [Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjqqTVVBTsxpm0iOhQ1fp9g).
Additionally, a really nice thanks for my dear colleague, Sebastian Kraus, for supporting me with audio recording equipment and for being the creative mastermind behind the logo design.
And last but not least i want to say a huge thank you to a special guy who supported me on this journey right from the beginning. Not just with nice words, but with his time, audio optimization knowhow and finally his gpu computing power.
