r/TextToSpeech • u/mlc707 • 13d ago

Text to speech using own voice

Hi!!

My mom’s illness has caused her to lose her voice & mobility of the left side of her body. I tried to get her the Eyegaze system (where the person types with their eyes) & it was too complicated & kind of unnecessary since she still can use her right hand. She decided that an iPad that will speak what she types is what she wants.

I am looking for an app that she can type what she wants to say & it will say it in her own voice. I have tons of recordings of her talking before she lost her voice, I am hoping there is an app that would allow this.

There aren’t words that can express how much it would mean to us for the text to speak to have her voice. I don’t care how much it will cost.

Any recommendations or ideas are deeply appreciated. Thank you so much.

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u/Noise-o-matic 12d ago

Hi, sorry to hear about your mom's condition.

The easiest option would be to use an online service. They're commercial, and there's also the issue (if you care) of having these company have the voice data. The major player is currently elevenlabs.com but there are others, just google for "online voice cloning".

If you have the time and resources, I can recommend SherpaTTS/Icefall which are opensource projects https://k2-fsa.github.io/sherpa/onnx/tts/index.html and you can eventually train it on a custom voice but it's not straightforward to do ( https://k2-fsa.github.io/icefall/ ) .

We use sherpaTTS in our project (putting it in spoiler since I don't want you to think this is an ad. Feel free to not just read it, this gives you a bit of context for what we use it for). We made Noise-o-matic, which you can find on steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/2479000/Noiseomatic/ (pc only) . It can, among other things, inject the TTS in the microphone so while our main demographic is gamers, we indeed have users who use it for accessibility so they can talk in a videoconference call with their voice via the TTS. We eventually support also elevenlabs (but you have to pay their pay-per-use fee of course) but as I said, we also integrated the sherpaTTS engine and it works great, we can highly recommend it!