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Comment by lherron | Hacker News Reader

Kokoro TTS is pretty good for open source. Worth checking out.

Yes, kokoro is great, and the language flexibility is a huge plus too. And the best prices per character is for sure if you self-host.

Oh man, they have the "Sky" voice, and it seems to be the same one that OpenAI had but then removed? Not sure how that's possible, but I'm very happy about it.

> Not sure how that's possible

Download bunch of movies Scarlet Johansen been in, segment into audio clips where she talks and train the model :)

Is it actually her? I didn't think it was, but maybe.

Unless there is some leak from OpenAI, I'm not sure we'll ever have it confirmed yes or no. But my brain thought it was Johansen from the first few seconds I heard the voice and I don't seem to be alone with that reaction. The fact that they removed the voice also speaks to it to have been trained on her voice.

Listening to it again today with fresher ears (the original OpenAI Sky, not the clones elsewhere), I still hear Johansen as the underlying voice actor for it, but maybe there is some subconscious bias I'm unable to bypass.

Hmm, I never thought it was her, her voice is much more raspy, whereas Sky is a bit lighter. I can hear the similarity, I just don't think they sound exactly alike.

As you say, I'm not sure we'll ever know, although the Sky voice from Kokoro is spot on the Sky voice from OpenAI, so maybe someone from Kokoro knows how they got it.

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