“I’m not a mechanic but I’d like a custom motorcycle. Seems easy enough, anyone up for the task? Or recommend me a commodity worker who can do it for nearly zero. Thanks!”

You should paste this into chatgpt. You might get some useful resources on where to go. Short answer.... You expect way too much for a budget of almost nothing

I don't mind paying for the task. I was not expecting it to be inexpensive.

So you want to use Google Custom Voice service to create a model of your own voice, then distill that voice into a custom on-device model?

Yes

Look into Tortoise TTS https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts and read the Adding a new voice part of things, that would be a good starting point.

$50,000 final offer

Most people in this field who are able to get jobs in this field have an undergrad in computer science, and a masters degree. It’s applied math + computer science, which is different from being a web developer. There are no people with these degrees who are struggling to find work currently, and they command relatively high salaries at their jobs (>150k USD guaranteed).

You might be able to find a regular dev who could put this together, but if something doesn’t work out of the box the chances that they’ll know how to address the problem is pretty much zero because it’s not just a coding issue. We don’t even look at resumes that don’t have a masters degree because it really is important that the candidate can do all kinds of math, knows the family of algorithms, how to train DL models well, can explain why something did or didn’t work, can do analysis of data and results, and can also write efficient code. LOL it’s a stressful field 😝

You’re already committed to paying for the custom voice? Honestly if you’re already paying for that they might just offer the option to buy an offline model you can run on prem.

I appreciate this feedback.

I haven't found that option on their site.

I know, but if you're paying for a custom voice that can't be cheap. I'd guess you'll be paying 5 figures at least for something like this, since you can't buy it without "contacting a sales rep". Your sales rep will be able to tell you if offline models are available, they often are but just aren't advertised.

To be honest though it sounds like you may be out of your depth, the Google custom voice product is expecting you to be a company with a deep pocketbook and a professional voice actor doing the reading. Is that who you are? If you're just some person who wants to use your own voice to read books, look into some of the zero shot TTS tools other people have posted.

"Toyota sells entire engines, they seem pretty straight forward to use, so all you would have to do is plug a few things in and we're good to go, probably just 1 or 2 days of work."

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I apologize---the custom voice is myself and any other local people in my project. It's not a new voice by itself. My apologies.

Sure, but we aren’t shopping for a supplier; we want an engineer.

Oh in that case then forget trying to distill the Google model, you'll need an ML expert and that will be expensive. As a reference, I have a decade of ML experience and for me to take on a project like this would probably cost you 10 grand at least. And that's not even counting the fact that Google could be unhappy with what you're doing and you risk getting banned from the service for attempting to distill their internal models.

Instead, just use Firefox's open-source TTS model: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

It might be slightly lower quality, but you can definitely pay a random coder on Fiverr to just integrate that into a website. No ML experience required, just Python.

Thank you. Does https://beta.elevenlabs.io use their own proprietary model? I couldn't find anything on their site. This is the model I'm after.

I'm not sure, but probably? You could reach out and ask

Expect to pay $100-$200 an hour, will probably take at least months

You don’t need code. You can use a service for that. Check Descript overdub for instance. Or whatever other similar thing you can find. I’m not affiliated with them but saw a demo. It will be done overnight after you spend 20 min reading some text.

I don’t know man, I think I could do it for $120,000

Side note but that model is absolutely exceptional if it's actually as they claim. The "Great Gatsby" reading is phenomenal, with the different voices for different characters. If they did that without specifically annotating they wanted a different voice I'm super impressed.