reference_clips = [utils.audio.load_audio(p, 22050) for p in clips_paths]
tts = api.TextToSpeech()
pcm_audio = tts.tts_with_preset("your text here", reference_clips, preset='fast')
```
## Voice customization guide
Tortoise was specifically trained to be a multi-speaker model. It accomplishes this by consulting reference clips.
These reference clips are recordings of a speaker that you provide to guide speech generation. These clips are used to determine many properties of the output, such as the pitch and tone of the voice, speaking speed, and even speaking defects like a lisp or stuttering. The reference clip is also used to determine non-voice related aspects of the audio output like volume, background noise, recording quality and reverb.
### Provided voices
This repo comes with several pre-packaged voices. You will be familiar with many of them. :)
Most of the provided voices were not found in the training set. Experimentally, it seems that voices from the training set
To add new voices to Tortoise, you will need to do the following:
1. Gather audio clips of your speaker(s). Good sources are YouTube interviews (you can use youtube-dl to fetch the audio), audiobooks or podcasts. Guidelines for good clips are in the next section.
2. Cut your clips into ~10 second segments. You want at least 3 clips. More is better, but I only experimented with up to 5 in my testing.
3. Save the clips as a WAV file with floating point format and a 22,050 sample rate.
4. Create a subdirectory in voices/
5. Put your clips in that subdirectory.
6. Run tortoise utilities with --voice=<your_subdirectory_name>.
1. Avoid clips with background music, noise or reverb. These clips were removed from the training dataset. Tortoise is unlikely to do well with them.
2. Avoid speeches. These generally have distortion caused by the amplification system.
3. Avoid clips from phone calls.
4. Avoid clips that have excessive stuttering, stammering or words like "uh" or "like" in them.
5. Try to find clips that are spoken in such a way as you wish your output to sound like. For example, if you want to hear your target voice read an audiobook, try to find clips of them reading a book.
6. The text being spoken in the clips does not matter, but diverse text does seem to perform better.
These settings are not available in the normal scripts packaged with Tortoise. They are available, however, in the API. See
```api.tts``` for a full list.
### Playing with the voice latent
Tortoise ingests reference clips by feeding them through individually through a small submodel that produces a point latent, then taking the mean of all of the produced latents. The experimentation I have done has indicated that these point latents are quite expressive, affecting
everything from tone to speaking rate to speech abnormalities.
This lends itself to some neat tricks. For example, you can combine feed two different voices to tortoise and it will output what it thinks the "average" of those two voices sounds like. You could also theoretically build a small extension to Tortoise that gradually shifts the
latent from one speaker to another, then apply it across a bit of spoken text (something I havent implemented yet, but might
get to soon!) I am sure there are other interesting things that can be done here. Please let me know what you find!
### Send me feedback!
Probabilistic models like Tortoise are best thought of as an "augmented search" - in this case, through the space of possible
utterances of a specific string of text. The impact of community involvement in perusing these spaces (such as is being done with
GPT-3 or CLIP) has really surprised me. If you find something neat that you can do with Tortoise that isn't documented here,
please report it to me! I would be glad to publish it to this page.
1. It is primarily good at reading books and speaking poetry. Other forms of speech do not work well.
2. It was trained on a dataset which does not have the voices of public figures. While it will attempt to mimic these voices if they are provided as references, it does not do so in such a way that most humans would be fooled.
3. The above points could likely be resolved by scaling up the model and the dataset. For this reason, I am currently withholding details on how I trained the model, pending community feedback.
4. I am releasing a separate classifier model which will tell you whether a given audio clip was generated by Tortoise or not. See `tortoise-detect` above.
5. If I, a tinkerer with a BS in computer science with a ~$15k computer can build this, then any motivated corporation or state can as well. I would prefer that it be in the open and everyone know the kinds of things ML can do.
### Diversity
The diversity expressed by ML models is strongly tied to the datasets they were trained on.
Tortoise was trained primarily on a dataset consisting of audiobooks. I made no effort to
balance diversity in this dataset. For this reason, Tortoise will be particularly poor at generating the voices of minorities
