Definitely good!

The hardest part still seem to get rid of the synthetic high pitch background noise, I've tried most of the text-to-voice synthesizers and ElevenLabs are still my benchmark.

For example:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WL_5gFswhZncERGzSRh2hQ42RVr...

I actually think Bark actually beats Eleven right now. Bark tends to add a bit more of a metallic twinge towards the end of longer audio segments, but Bark is more expressive. The trick to beating Eleven quality is using multiple speaker prompts, and swapping them in and out over the course of longer texts. Each is a slight variation on the original.

I don't have a clip handy but I will make a YouTube or something this week, because the quality is wild if you do this. There's some passable audio clips on my README here https://github.com/JonathanFly/bark decent but that was all just the first stuff I tried, without really putting any effort into it.

Thanks, I checked more of the bark examples and they definitely add the "personal" touch to it, elevenlabs sound more stale, so i definitely see what you mean. I also listened a few more times to your sample and it's one of the hardest types of voices to get to sound natural, when i tried a similar on elevenlabs, it sounded a lot worse in terms of the metallic s-s at the end.

I'll set it up this weekend and play around with it :)

>when i tried a similar on elevenlabs, it sounded a lot worse in terms of the metallic s-s at the end.

That's interesting. When I'm judging Bark I'm looking at my own random samples, but for eleven I'm seeing stuff people post on Twitter or YouTube, which I suppose must be cherry-picked. I didn't even realize Eleven did the same thing!

I guess it's similar to what you mentioned with bark, the more training and custom adaptation that can be done, the less metallic it will sound. I tested with random voices until i got one that was similar, the existing Bella voice is almost as your sample but has very little metallic s-s.

I'm curious, how did you generate the David Attenborough voice? The repo says:

> Bark tries to match the tone, pitch, emotion and prosody of a given preset, but does not currently support custom voice cloning.

>I'm curious, how did you generate the David Attenborough voice? The repo says: >> Bark tries to match the tone, pitch, emotion and prosody of a given preset, but does not currently support custom voice cloning

Check back later in the week, I'll have a bit more on that later after I catch up on actual work and can write a bit.

Thanks!

Not used at all, at least in my case.

I understand you didn't use that repo but did you do something other than change the audio prompt ?

Yeah, it's kind of hand crafted.

Replying to myself in an old thread as a little easter egg. Bark is just so fun I can't resist a teaser.

Suno is seriously underselling the power of the fully operational Bark model. I'm already cranking out "French Obamas" and I didn't know anything about TTS a month ago. Heck, I still barely know anything. (Obama has been annoyingly resistant to gender flipping though.)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZbJYXoH8gmrEyMe1AJ0VdwzZkf_...

could you share a few resources on it. looking forward to your writeup

Yeah I was trying to figure out how good it was in Korean. The cadence and flow was pretty good but there was kind of artifacts in the audio. Then I check the samples of the default audio prompts for Korean any my god, they were godawful. Switching it up made a world of difference.

>Yeah I was trying to figure out how good it was in Korean. The cadence and flow was pretty good but there was kind of artifacts in the audio. Then I check the samples of the default audio prompts for Korean any my god, they were godawful. Switching it up made a world of difference.

I have a decent amount really clear Korean voices BTW. That and French, from people asking on Discord. But I can't judge the accents only that they are clear speakers.

Korean was interestingly the lone somewhat-coherent one-shot long term music sample I ever managed to get out of Bark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pV9d25KqCE

The second music bit in this Youtube was one continuous generation where the last prompt was used as the history for the next, with no cherry picking or assembling the clips, just one solid segment. And it sort of holds together for like almost a minute!

I was excited because I thought maybe Bark could be like a real-time OpenAI Jukebox. But that was literally the only time so far where using a full-feedback held together like that. You can kind of 'cheat' it to by using a very popular song as the input text, and sometimes Bark will produce the appropriate melody. But of course that's not really the point of using your own text. I have some ideas for making it more coherent, but nothing easy. Too bad, Jukebox is just SO SLOW.

Actually with what I know now I should re-render this and clean up the distortion. At the time I couldn't do it. Though I only have the first segment prompt.

I have a decent amount really clear Korean voices BTW. But I can't judge the accents, only that they are clear.