Coqui XTTS: A Breakthrough in Voice Generation

Voice generation is the task of creating synthetic speech from text or other inputs. It has many applications, such as voice assistants, audiobooks, voice cloning, and more. However, voice generation is also a challenging problem that requires high-quality, natural-sounding, and expressive speech output.

Coqui, a company that aims to free speech with open and accessible tools, has recently released a new model for voice generation called XTTS. XTTS is a generative, text-to-speech foundation model that is both open and production-quality. It is based on Tortoise, a previous model developed by Coqui, but with important improvements that make it more versatile and powerful.

XTTS has several features that make it stand out from other voice generation models:

• Quality: XTTS generates speech that meets and exceeds production-quality requirements. It uses a high sampling rate of 24 kHz and produces clear and natural speech with minimal artifacts.
• Multilingual: XTTS supports 13 languages: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. It can generate speech in any of these languages from text input.
• Voice Cloning: XTTS can clone any voice using only a small sample of the original voice. For example, you can give a voice sample in German and create a clone that sounds like the original voice speaking German.
• Cross-Language Voice Cloning: XTTS can also clone voices across languages. For example, you can give a voice sample in German and create a clone that sounds like the original voice speaking any of the other languages supported by XTTS.
• Emotion and Style Transfer: XTTS can transfer the emotion and style of a source voice to a target voice. For example, you can give a voice sample of an angry person and create a clone that sounds like a calm person with the same voice characteristics.

XTTS is the first model of its kind to be released under the Coqui Public Model License (CPML), a new and innovative license for generative models. The CPML aims to balance the interests of the model creators, users, and society at large. It allows anyone to use the model for non-commercial purposes, but requires a license for commercial use. It also prohibits harmful uses of the model, such as impersonation, fraud, or harassment.

Coqui has also made XTTS available through various channels, such as the Hugging Face platform,  the TTS API,  and the TTS command line tool. Users can easily access and experiment with XTTS using these tools.

XTTS is a breakthrough in voice generation that showcases the power and potential of open and accessible speech technology. It offers high-quality, multilingual, and expressive speech output that can be used for various purposes. It also demonstrates Coqui’s commitment to freeing speech with open and ethical models.