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.