“When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer.
The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.”
Since 2021, I’ve been collecting fully consented voice data from over 20,000 people, 1M audio recordings, and over 1,800 hrs of audio captured to date. For this model, I used a small part of the data, 136 hrs, to finetune Maya1 and expand it’s capabilities.
Hurston-1 is a narrowband TTS model that focuses the output on telephone use because that is still where most of these voices will be heard. I’ve used it to support customers such as Amazon and Salesforce and generated over half-mill revenue with it. Now I’m open sourcing it to help unlock opportunities for others as well.
Limitations: this model doesn’t maintain the exact same voice across prompts and doesn’t support voice cloning. For many use cases, this is fine but maybe not so - if you’re creating podcasts.
This is the first release - I’m already working on the next version with improvements.
I would appreciate, if anyone is interested in this space, download the model from huggingface, check it out and let me know any feedback. Also, open to connecting with others in this space as well.
"Samsung running a TensorFlow lite model on 960x540 image to track you": https://twitter.com/mike64_t/status/2114150399406202896
"Samsung TVs look for microphones in your house via Bluetooth and then spy events": https://twitter.com/freddier/status/2114042326758867453