I recently implemented Fish for a project and found it adequate for TTS but wildly impressive in voice cloning. My POC originally required 3-10 audio samples but I removed the minimum because it could usually one shot it.

The model is good, but I will say their inference code leaves a lot to be desired. I had to rewrite large portions of it for simple things like correct chunking and streaming. The advertised expressive keywords are very much hit and miss, and the devs have gone dark unfortunately.

There's a lot of money and effort spent in satisfying the sexual desires of (predominantly straight) men. There's not typically quite as much interest in doing the same for women.

For example I've been looking at models and loras for generating images, and the boards are _full_ of ones that will generate women well or in some particular style. Quite often at least a couple of the preview images for each are hidden behind a button because they contain nudity. Clearly the intent is that they are at least able to generate porn containing women. There's a small handful that are focused on men and they're very aware of it, they all have notes lampshading how oddball they are to even exist.

I would expect that this is not as pronounced an effect in the world generating speech, but it must still exist.

If you don't know, it's on you to learn. If you do know and prefer to make an asshole of yourself, that's also on you.

Oh my goodness, I forgot about "Microsoft Works" you just shot me back in time to the 2000s

You misquoted Microsoft "Works"

I tried listening to audiobooks generated with tts. It takes me out of it most of the time, and I lose focus. That podcast thing from google was the first time I felt like I could listen to an entire thing without feeling the uncanny valley thing. And I knew it was genAI. So I'm looking for that, but for my content. Grab a bunch of articles (long form, deeply researched) and "podcast" them but with natural voices, sans hype. Or books. Have them ready when I'm out and about.

Audiobooks and other material you want to listen to (articles, blog posts, etc.).

There's a lot of stuff I don't have time to sit down and read, but want to listen to while I cook/laundry/shower/drive/etc.

Often recordings don't exist. Or when they do, an audiobook just has a bad voiceover artist, or one that just rubs you the wrong way.

The more human text-to-speech sounds, the easier and less distracting it is to listen to. There's real value in it, it's not "because I can".

You know how it's nicer to read in 300 dpi instead of 72 dpi? Or in Garamond rather than Courier? Or in Helvetica rather than Comic Sans? It's like that, only for speech.

> Question is why would you need to have the computer sound more human

I think translation would be a big use - maybe translating your voice to another language while maintaining emotion and intonation, or dubbing content (videos, movies, podcasts, ...) that isn't otherwise available in your native language.

Traditional non-ML TTS for longer content like podcasts or audiobooks seems like it'd become grating to the point of being unlistenable, or at least a significantly worse experience. Stands to benefit from more natural sounding voices that can place emphasis in the right places.

Since Stephen Hawking was brought up, there are likely also people with voice-impairing illnesses who would like to speak in their own voice again (in addition to those who are fine with a robotic voice). Or alternatively, people who are uncomfortable with their natural voice and want to communicate closer to how they wish to be perceived.

Could also potentially be used for new forms of interactive media that aren't currently feasible - customised movies, audio dramas where the listener plays a role, videogame NPCs that react with more than just prerecorded lines, etc.