Edge TTS
github.comI wouldn't use Edge TTS for commercial projects since it's using an internal Microsoft API that was reverse engineered.
If you are looking for a commercial API, I just launched a TTS API powered by the the best performing open source model Kokoro: https://www.lemonfox.ai/text-to-speech-api. The API is compatible with OpenAI and ElevenLabs and up to 25x cheaper.
It's worth noting that there have been occasions where the library was blocked and it took a few weeks to workaround said block. For example, when a valid Sec-MS-Token became required, it took a while to implement it in the library: https://github.com/rany2/edge-tts/blob/08b10b931db3f788a506c...
Basically, it's a very bad idea to use this library for anything serious/mission critical. It also is really limited to only taking in text (i.e., no custom SSML, emotion elements, etc) as Microsoft restricts the API to only the features Microsoft Edge itself already supports. Generally commercial users would want these more advanced features and so they'd want to use Azure Cognitive Services.
At any rate this library was never really marketed, I'm not sure how it blew up. It was really only intended so that I can have audio files I can play back for my Home Assistant instance. Later, I started using it to generate e-books. In general, these are the two main uses of the library AFAIK.
> no custom SSML
I believe this used to be available for edge tts, very sad to see they removed it.
If anyone knows of comparable projects that implement something like SSML please do share.
While technically the library could continue supporting custom SSML, I ended up removing it because keeping the support was pointless. The API stopped allowing anything other than the basic tags used by Microsoft Edge itself (i.e., prosody for rate/volume/pitch, voice, etc).
As for comparable projects, you can use Azure's offerings instead. They have a free tier that's really generous.
Fair point! I should have clarified I'm disappointed that Microsoft removed the capability from the api.
or run a kokoro tts docker container on your own hardware, the hw requirements aren't crazy: https://github.com/remsky/Kokoro-FastAPI
Better yet, you can run it on your browser, in Javascript and not pay any fees! https://huggingface.co/spaces/webml-community/kokoro-web
Nice I was thinking about launching an API because providers like Replicate have long queues. I think if you can nail down latency and concurrency you may get a lot of users who need reliable fast TTS.
Ah, I'm always looking for new ones, but it doesn't look like it supports SSML. Most engines have trouble with things like postal codes, names, and other implicit linguistic rules. Take the example
> Melania Trump's zip code is 20001.
It says "Melaynia Trump's zip code is twenty-thousand one". With SSML, you can tell the engine the correct pronunciation and to say a string of numbers digit-by-digit. Spelling proper nouns differently to trick it into pronouncing it correctly works until it doesn't.
Being able to tell it to pronounce "Melania" like [ˌməˈlɑːn.jə] or [%m@"lA:n.j@] and tweak other aspects of the synthesis with SSML is, in my opinion, an important part of a commercial speech synthesis offering.
I wonder how much effort is needed to make these engines work with SSML. Kokoro+SSML would be awesome.
Hey BrunoJo, I'd like to learn more about lemonfox.ai, but there does not seem to be information such as "about us" links. Your service looks worth investigating.
Interesting, I'm interested in something like this, but the page doesn't have much information. - What languages are supported? - How many voices are available? - Is it possible to use without a monthly subscription? I'd rather pay only based on my usage (I don't use it every month).
For my use case, I'd need access to a wide variety of languages, and ideally 5+ voices per language. I'm currently using Amazon Polly, but I wonder if there's something better now.
I wish Kokoro supported SSML... Is there a way to explicitly emphasize parts of the text?
Why would you pirate a TTS service when there are so many great options for local open source TTS now? Models like Fish and Kokoro and StyleTTSv2 are great and very fast.
Click the leaderboard tab here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/TTS-AGI/TTS-Arena
The models you shared only support the top ~10 languages / english only.
I believe the Edge API supports more models:
https://gist.github.com/BettyJJ/17cbaa1de96235a7f5773b8690a2...
Do you know any commercial licensed TTS that support 50+ languages and are relatively small (e.g. many small models, not 1 big model)? Meta's open models supports like 300 languages, but the license doesn't permit commercial use :-/
I have been experimenting with piper TTS recently, it's free, open source, fast and has a lot of voices in different languages but the quality is not the best but it's still good enough for most cases.
For my native language, Norwegian, Piper TTS is at best "usable", and sometimes a fair bit worse than that. At least in its default form[1].
Especially the rhythm and timing is often very jarring making words difficult to understand, especially when the pitch is not quite right.
It also doesn't seem to know about pacing, ignoring semicolon and comma.
Combined I often need to think hard about what it just said, or even listen to it again.
I also notice these issues in the various English voice models to varying degrees, so seems to be an inherent problem. Or can it be improved significantly with training it yourself?
I don’t know about Norwegian but I wonder if the issues are due to the training data.
I’m sure it’s possible to train new voices.
The English voices are hit or miss, but some voices have up to 900 speakers so it should be able to find a nice voice in the hay stack.
The thing I like about piper is it is so fast. I set it up to stream the output to VLC and it starts speaking in less than a second even on my laptop.
I wish it could have eleven labs quality but right now the speed is the most important factor for what I’m doing with it.
I saw that the piper-phonemize project linked to espeak-ng, and so I tried to pass the Piper sample text through espeak-ng and the way it phonemicized the text had the same rhythm issues that I noted in the TTS sample. Ie it put the stresses in the same wrong places in certain words and such.
This was also reflected in the voice output of espeak-ng, even though it's overall quality was vastly subpar compared to Piper TTS (as expected).
So it seems that improving this aspect might be one way to get better performance out of Piper for my language. Not sure how easy that'll be tho...
What TTS model has given the best results for you (for Norwegian)? I've tried MS Azure and it's pretty good, but not flawless.
I haven't found any open source that come close to the commercial offerings, though I admin I haven't tried 'em all.
Azure like you say is pretty decent, Google does an ok enough job but not as good.
Piper is superb for my needs. Runs extremely fast on CPU (so fast it can run in real time on a raspi) so it's perfect for use on laptops without dedicated GPUs. Subjectively, I'd say the quality is about on par with where MacOS's TTS was about 10 years ago, which is extremely usable.
I also have used Piper and agree it is worth trying out.
https://ttsvoicesavailable.streamlit.app
Acapela, Nuance - but its around 75 languages.
I really want southeast Asian languages (thai, laos, etc). seems only MS supports those.
Isn't that Nuance product EOL?
I don't know, but the Edge API is not licensed for any use, commercial or otherwise (outside of Edge itself).
"pirate"? This was always free.
The API endpoint was clearly intended for use only by Edge. Yes, reverse engineering the authentication (even if trivial) and using it for other applications, knowing that was not its intended use, I consider a form of piracy.
I'm not really sure how this is any different from a web crawler? I guess the issue would be republishing the content is bad.
But I thought the LinkedIn lawsuit settled that crawlers are ok, as long as you're not republishing the content?
That is a very hazardous slope to go down. We are already seeing user-agent discrimination and this is no different than using Bing from a browser that isn't Edge.
If Bing wasn't a public website and only accessable through the windows Search bar/Edge without reverse engineering the API I'd agree with you.
Comparing an API that typically requires a key and a public website is absurd.
It's still publicly accessible.
Typing anything with “r” into that text to speech box gives a random sentence instead
Is Kokoro open source? I couldn't find it's source anywhere.
or directly try https://kokorotts.com/ or https://huggingface.co/spaces/hexgrad/Kokoro-TTS
Its not running on the edge. A hack to use MS online tts.
>> edge-tts is a Python module that allows you to use Microsoft Edge's online text-to-speech service from within your Python code or using the provided edge-tts or edge-playback command.
I read it first as Edge TTL!
Edge = Microsoft Edge, a browser
I guess parent wanted just to clarify that it’s using Edge not running on the edge.
Have been using this for some time. It is pretty good. But not as good as ElevenLabs though.
Also, ironically enough, ElevenLabs lunched a readerapp for iOS and Android, which allows you to text to speech for "free" in some limited voice selections, but the app is not available for PC or as browser extension. So like "we give you unlimited tts but only if you use your smartphone"
Not sure if the CLI does this directly, but here's a command that takes text either as an arg or through stdin.
function tts() {
if [ -p /dev/stdin ]; then
edge-playback --file -
else
edge-playback --text "$*"
fi
}I like to use Edge on occasion when I need to read something dry but necessary because I find following along with the TTS it’s auto-highlight of text helps me stay focused and retain better as well.
Is there any equivalent program for ebooks? If not can someone build one? The dream would be to plop in an arbitrary document (pdf, docs, tex, epub, and so on) and have it read to me by a reasonable TTS at a speed of my choosing and have words / lines highlighted as the TTS goes along. Bonus points if you can regularly identify and skip things that are not necessarily relevant like page numbers, headers, footnote markers, and so on, which is something that Edge TTS within Edge struggles with when reading PDFs.
I've been using https://readest.com/ lately. It's FOSS and just recently got this feature. The TTS voices are pretty natural and text is highlighted one sentence at a time. Plus the design of the product is great.
https://www.naturalreaders.com/, is has a free tier I think
If anyone else wonders, naturalreaders provides no API.
The ReadEra app for android supports this, and I use it for reading/listening to ebooks during commute. It works well.
You can use a screen reader. Most of them have a focus highlight feature and use local tts.
Calibre does this.
can you use TTS models?
Can anyone just make a simple program that will use one of these better TTS engines. I just want a a dialog box, a big button that says "Generate text" and you paste in the content you want converted to receive an MP3 file. Fully compiled binaries for Linux, Windows, and Mac, please?
I'd like the equivalent of "say" from macOS on my W11/WSL2 machine, is there anything entirely offline that just works?
Windows have had built-in speech synthesis for quite a while here is a blog with a guide, but you can also look it up on msdn
https://www.pdq.com/blog/powershell-text-to-speech-examples/
Great, thank you very much!
Thanks for sharing this, I learnt that Edge on mobile has TTS as well but I have never used it on desktop or mobile
Now that I try it on desktop, it's really good! I might try to use the python script in the future
This is dubious, I'm surprised MS hasn't locked down those APIs yet.
I'm curious, would this be the legal equivalent of "cracked" software in terms of piracy?
They have locked down these APIs slightly but it's not a very complex "DRM" mechanism: https://github.com/rany2/edge-tts/blob/08b10b931db3f788a506c...
Sure, but if everybody starts (ab)using this they'll change it again with something more complex. Or they will restrict it, like leaving it usable only by users logged in on their MS account.
In reality, you should be more worried about a DMCA claim or cease and desist.
Microsoft cannot move fast enough to present any real concern to someone who is dedicated.
The Microsoft login seems more reasonable, at that point they can filter out bad actors presumably.
Don't ever let them convince you that you can't find out what code running on your own computer is doing.
Of course not... as long as the code is actually running on my computer. If it need authentication, it's another story.
So is this entirely offline? If so, it could have quite many useful applications, if not for copyleft of course.
Entirely online.
Ah, thanks.
used this for ages. i have my raspberry pi setup with Cloudflare tunnels to rout to my domain... extremely useful :)
Do what now to TTS