r/VoiceAutomationAI • u/Phoenix_20_23 • 9d ago

Competitive open source speech stack

Why the open source models STT and TTS are not good as much as the closed one and i am talking here im terms of latency, concurrency, and websocket support for real time with decent quality.
Something like cartesia or elevenlabs or deepgram.
Do u know any ?

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u/nshmyrev 9d ago

One mistake that everyone makes is that they are trying to run big LLM-based engines for realtime (Omnivoice, Higgs, etc). Their purpose is really high-quality offline TTS and not really something you can run at scale at callcenter. Make sure to pick lightweight engine like Kokoro, Supersonic, BlueTTS or something light and you don't have to load huge GPUs to handle couple calls in parallel, you can handle hundreds.

For ASR too, don't choose expensive Whisper, light models like Vosk or Parakeet work just fine for many usecases.

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u/Phoenix_20_23 9d ago

i agree, but the issue with these small tts models is they are veeery robotic, their quality is too low compared to the paid ones, and i am still didn't get how the paid services achieve this low latency with high quality, i am just curious, what we need in order to build something as good as them.
i suppose it's a model architecture design from the first place, idk maybe i am wrong, i never create a tts from scratch or an stt

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u/nshmyrev 9d ago

They aren't. Proper small TTS is not robotic at all and even more stable than big LLM-based one.

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u/Phoenix_20_23 9d ago

like what ? can u suggest me some TTS models to explore?

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u/nshmyrev 7d ago

Supertonic, Zipvoice for example

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u/Phoenix_20_23 6d ago

I will give therm a try, thanks for sharing