next steps after shutdown

[bachittle]

According to the main site https://coqui.ai/ , coqui is shutting down, which is unfortunate as these open source libraries are great and could still be maintained. I'm wondering if there are any next steps to proceed, like if the license should allow for commercial use and the open source community could fork this repository to keep it alive. Hoping we can still get use out of it because I'd say it is currently the best open-source voice synthesis and cloning toolkit out there at the moment.

For reference, I also have tried standalone bark, StyleTTS 2 and OpenVoice as alternatives, but I find the voice cloning was not as good as this library (general synthesis is pretty good, but cloning in particular is hard to get right).

[slavakurilyak]

+1 for clarity on commercial licensing terms

[NiluK]

Further info from tweet: https://twitter.com/_josh_meyer_/status/1742522906041635166

I can get why they're shutting down, Google, OpenAI, Elevenlabs, Amazon, etc TTS space is really crowded.

[SomeDevWeb]

O man, and I just restarted looking into coqui today and when I went online to refresh myself on some commands, I saw the website closed :(
But just to say, I still have it installed on my Win laptop, but on its Linux (WSL) and most of the models still work. I even tested some new ones and they downloaded OK. Some ofcourse give errors, but that's expected.
So ya, I surely hope the community will pick this up and reignite the fire!
As @NiluK said, the author incourages people to continue the effort... :)

Hm... I was wondering if it would be a good idea to install a server somewhere and create a very simple web GUI so we can test it that way...

[alexiri]

The code is licensed MPL-2.0 license. Should be fine to fork and continue the project, no?

[jp-x-g]

Yeah, the thing I was confused about was whether there was any plan on the part of the repository's current owners to continue maintaining it. Per CODE_OWNERS.rst there's supposed to be someone to consult about stuff. @erogol @reuben @Edresson Do you all intend to continue as maintainers (accepting PRs etc) or should we make a new fork?

[erogol]

I don't plan to continue maintaining the code atm. things might change in the future.

[enzyme69]

Man that's unfortunate, so Rabbit AI is buying coqui XTTS? I love using it so simple and easy~

[metal3d]

You should take a look at the long discussion here #3490

There's no aggression, just great disappointment and a desire on the part of the community to use XTTS without restriction. The aim is to promote the model and try to revive it, in the hope of relaunching it in a truly "free" mode.

Because, frankly, the situation is bitter. I was going to propose to my employers the use of this model for customers, they would have paid, and we on our side would have enormous satisfaction in offering a solution of this quality.

If the model becomes completely closed, resold to "who knows who", we won't use it... and we'll still be stuck with Google and Amazon APIs because they're cheaper (despite all the scandals they cause, our customers prefer these solutions because nobody else offers anything better).

I'm going to reiterate a comparison that I insist on heavily, but Blender suffered the same fate 20 years ago. Luckily, instead of selling the source code to a company that was going to close the software down, Ton Roosendaal had the genius to find a way of making Blender completely free to access and use. Today, it's one of the best 3D softwares on the market, and the Blender foundation earns enough money to pay salaries and recruit.

The "hybrid" mode of XTTS trained was not a wise choice. But please, let us use it commercially, and you can try to sell support and/or a studio or datasets, or API access. Blender does it, you can do it too.

[metal3d]

(this situation reminds me what Sonos made to the Snips project... we, users, have filled the dataset, and one day Snips has sold the entire project that became entirely closed... don't do the same, please)