Coqui's Sixth Mondays Newsletter
- 👩💻Work at Coqui
- 👋🏽Introduction
- v0.2.1, New 🐸TTS Version Delivered Fresh
- Coqui on the Inside: Super Suits for Superheroes👩🏻🚒
- Coqui on the Inside: TWB + Coqui + Swahili = <3
- Interspeech, the Speech Conference, and We’re There📣
- Onward and Upward🚀, Presentation at Rasa’s L3-AI
👩💻Work at Coqui
By Kelly Davis
Yeah, you heard that right; we’re hiring!
An open source remote-friendly Berlin based startup founded by the creators of Mozilla’s text-to-speech (TTS) and speech-to-text (STT) engines (over 600K downloads and 23K GitHub stars), with the backing of investors from around the globe (London, San Francisco, and Berlin), and we’re hiring!
What’s not to love?
We’re hiring across-the-board for a number of roles; so, there’s something for everyone:
- Head of Product
- 3 x Senior Full Stack Engineers
- 2 x Senior STT Deep Learning Engineers
- 2 x Senior TTS Deep Learning Engineers
- 2 x Senior, Developer Community Managers
The full list of open positions is available on our jobs page.
We’d love to hear from you; so, if any roles pique your interest, reach out to [email protected]. 🐸!
👋🏽Introduction
By Kelly Davis
Once again we’re cooking up some speech goodness for you!
Delivered fresh, we’ve v0.2.1, a new 🐸TTS version for you to dig into. With a new end-to-end 🐸TTS model and 5 new pre-trained models, one can synthesize voices from 110 different speakers. It’s chock full of goodness.
Coqui on the inside! Beyond the open source goodness we’re delivering, Coqui’s quietly being integrated into evermore products. For example, Galactic Bioware, a protective and smart-wear company, is integrating 🐸STT into their smart firefighter suits. The applications are endless. Also, Translators without Borders/CLEAR Global is using Swahili 🐸STT for chatbots, transcriptions, and telephone assistance. Nice!
Where there’s a speech conference there’s a Coqui. We just presented our latest TTS work at Interspeech, the speech conference of the year! Also, the video of our presentation at Rasa’s L3-AI was just released.
Enjoy the newsletter!
v0.2.1, New 🐸TTS Version Delivered Fresh
By Eren Gölge
This new version introduces a new end-to-end TTS model implementation and 5 pre-trained models. Check the release notes for all the details of the release and dev plans to see what is next.
We added the VITS model to the 🐸TTS model collection. It is the first end-to-end TTS model implementation added to our library. It directly converts the input text to the waveform without needing an external vocoder training. For more info about VITS, please see the paper and the documentation.
We are also releasing the following pre-trained models:
Tacotron2 with Double Decoder Consistency (DDC) trained on the LJSpeech dataset, using phonemes as the input. Try it out:
tts --model_name tts_models/en/ljspeech/tacotronDDC_ph --text "hello, how are you today?"
A UnivNet vocoder to work with the model above.
HifiGAN vocoder trained on Japanese Kokoro dataset (👑@kaiidams) to complement the Japanese Tacotron2 DDC. Try it out:
tts --model_name tts_models/ja/kokoro/tacotron2-DDC --text "こんにちは、今日はいい天気ですか?"
VITS trained on the English LJSpeech dataset. Try it out:
tts --model_name tts_models/en/ljspeech/vits --text "hello, how are you today?"
VITS multi-speaker model trained on the English VCTK dataset. This model can synthesize voices from 110 different speakers. Try it out:
tts-server --model_name tts_models/en/vctk/vits
Huge thanks to:
- 👑 Agrin Hilmkil @agrinh
- 👑 Ayush Chaurasia @AyushExel
- 👑 @fijipants
for their contributions to these versions.
Coqui on the Inside: Super Suits for Superheroes👩🏻🚒
By Josh Meyer
Galactic Bioware, a protective and smart-wear company based in Australia and the US, is integrating 🐸STT into their future lines of smart firefighter suits. Firefighters wear heavy suits and gloves in order to protect themselves, but rapid communication is critical. Handheld walkie-talkies are not ideal, but they’re still widely used. 🐸STT is small enough to live inside the suit itself, which is critical in high-stakes situations where any delay in communication could cost lives. The firefighter will be able not only to communicate with their team and back to base, but use voice commands to access information from the suit’s sensors, such as surrounding temperature and oxygen levels.
Coqui on the Inside: TWB + Coqui + Swahili = <3
By Josh Meyer
We previously told you about progress being made at Translators without Borders/CLEAR Global (TWB) for 🐸STT and the Bengali language, and we already have more news!
TWB trained a production-worthy Swahili speech-to-text model (for Congolese Swahili) using 🐸STT, and they generously released the model in the Coqui Model Zoo. This Swahili model will help develop use-cases like voice chatbots, machine-assisted transcription, and telephone IVR to empower humanitarian communication in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Alp Öktem, computational linguist at TWB and co-founder of Col·lectivaT, trained the model using only 12 hours of data, which are also made publicly available from the TWB project portal. Keep an eye out for new models and new voice-enabled applications from TWB!
Interspeech, the Speech Conference, and We’re There📣
By Eren Gölge
This week 👑 Edresson Casanova presented one of our latest works, the SC-Glow multi-speaker TTS, at Interspeech 2021. You can see the paper here and checkout the poster below. You can already try out the model with 🐸TTS!
Big shout out to all the 🐸 community for making this work possible!! Here’s our poster:
Onward and Upward🚀, Presentation at Rasa’s L3-AI
By Josh Meyer
We made an appearance at the L3-AI conference on conversational AI and in case you missed it, you can watch the Coqui presentation video online! Listen to our co-founder Josh talk about building modern speech pipelines for the enterprise that scale to new users, new domains, and new applications.
This isn’t the first time we’ve chatted with Rasa. If you missed our earlier podcast, we talk about the lay of the land for open speech technology, and you can listen to the podcast today.