Is this really better than eleven labs?
Eleven Labs is the first voice synthesis that is good enough that I'd listen to an audiobook generated from it, but pricing is such that it would cost $100 to synthesize a 10 hour audiobook. A little too expensive. If they could get it down to $10 I'd cancel my Audible subscription and just synthesize audio from ebook text.
So if I can get a locally running voicebox model and just leave it running on my laptop over night transcribing an audiobook, that's even better.
Although it wasn't clear to me how voicebox compares.
1 - Is a real pain to get 'working right' - it's not even remotely batteries included
and, more importantly:
2 - Is incredibly slow. I've been turning Heart Of Darkness into an audiobook as a unit test and it takes ~30m per paragraph, on average. Add to that the occasional hiccup where a block gets transcribed badly (Tortoise occasionally 'drops out' of it's selected voice) and Tortoise only really works if you have a ton of compute and you still don't mind waiting forever.
This is basically my dream for local AI... locals models trained on my own data/code/styles. Even if they're slow, as long as they work (V/RAM) and are of high enough quality then I'm happy to wait!