Could someone please remind me, what was this thing? Don't want to say that all "AI applications" are the same React frontend over ChatGPT, but it is hard to differentiate when there are 7000 new ones every day.
At the time (2018-ish), it was really impressive for on-device voice synthesis (with a quality approaching the Google and Azure cloud-based voice synthesis options) and open source, so a lot of people in the FOSS community were hoping it could be used for a privacy-respecting home assistant, Linux speech synthesis that doesn't suck, etc.
After Mozilla abandoned the project, Coqui continued development and had some really impressive one-shot voice cloning, but pivoted to marketing speech synthesis for game developers. They were probably having trouble monetizing it, and it doesn't surprise me that they shut down.
My only exposure to Coqui was their text to speech software. If I remember correctly the website was a commercialized service with TTS and probably some other related things. I hope the software work continues in the open.
they have been around since pre chatgpt era, and not relevant to chatgpt. chatgpt understands text, coqui reads text. they're a text-to-speech / voice cloning/voice generation company.
their founders were working at Mozilla when Mozilla sunset its speech products. They founded coqui and released text-to-speech models based on their previous work. They tried to do a mix of open-source and closed-source stuff and introduced weird licensing concept that I never understood. there are many mediocre to good open-source TTS alternatives. they might have struggled to differentiate.
it's sad that people complain about big tech dominance, yet don't pay startups. i dont know the founders but i suspect they will join a big tech company as most of the Mozilla team did and we'll keep feeding Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
Coqui is shutting down.
It's sad news to start the new year, but I want to take a minute to recognize everything we accomplished and thank the great people who made it possible.
First things first: the Team
I'm honored to have worked with such brilliant, dedicated, and inspiring individuals. We were a small team, but we left our scratch on the earth's crust. Our accomplishments stand on their own, but when you remember we were just a rag-tag team with limited compute... now that's special.
Big tech had orders of magnitude more compute, data, and researchers, but we gave them a run for their money. We didn't just replicate the state-of-the-art... we created it! That wouldn't have been possible without this exact team.
We were spread across five continents, native languages, and backgrounds... and we built something great. I'm sure that we built great tech because of that mix of perspectives.
I will deeply miss our team, but I'm also excited to see what they do next. Whoever gets them on-board will be a lucky duck :)
What we accomplished
Way back in 2016, it all began as the Machine Learning Group at Mozilla. First was DeepSpeech, then Common Voice and TTS. Crazy how far the field has come since then. We spun out as Coqui in 2021 in order to add rocket fuel to our mission.
One of our biggest accomplishments at Coqui was XTTS. The state-of-the-art took a huge leap forward when we openly released model weights for XTTS v1... and v2 was even better! I'm thrilled to see where AI is heading, and proud that we could make some of that progress available to everyone.
Here's a tiny snapshot of what we accomplished at Coqui:
2021: Coqui STT v1.0 release. Coqui Model Zoo goes live. SC-GlowTTS released.
2022: YourTTS goes viral. Tons of open-source releases. Building the team.
2023: Coqui Studio webapp and API go live. First customers. XTTS open release.
I can confidently say that we pushed the state-of-the-art for generative speech technology... before it was called "generative" :)
Thank you
It took a village to make Coqui possible, and I want to thank everyone who gave us a shot.
The real rockstars are the team, as I said above. Thank you!
A huge thanks to the community. You have always been our core. From the Mozilla days on IRC to the current Discord server. The community has contributed, supported, and made building in the open a joy. Thank you all!
Thank you to our investors. Coqui simply wouldn't have been possible without you. You believed in us before anyone else; you took a chance on us. More than just an investment, your thoughtful insights and discussions made Coqui a better company and a better product. I'm extremely grateful for your support. Thank you!
Thank you to our customers. Everything we built was for you, and I hope we managed to give you something you loved. Especially thank you for your feedback: both the good and the bad. We did our best to hear you and build you something better everyday. Thank you!
Lastly, thank you to our partners over the years. It's a long list of great folks I've been lucky enough to collaborate with. We worked on open science, open code, and open models. From joint research to hackathons, it was a blast! To the great folks at HuggingFace, Mozilla, Masakhane, Harvard, Indiana University, Google, MLCommons, Landing AI, NVIDIA, Intel, and Makerere University... thank you! Forgive me if I've left anyone out.
What's next
I can't yet say what comes next... but generative AI in 2024 is going to be bigger than ever. Generative voice will only get better, faster, cheaper, and easier to fine-tune... open-source will be a huge part of that.
Speaking of open-source... Coqui TTS is on Github. Do something awesome with it!
Thank you all
