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Readme

Echogarden

A fully open-source speech system designed with end-users in mind.

Written in TypeScript, for the Node.js runtime
Easy to install, run and update
Runs on Windows (x64), macOS (x64, ARM64) and Linux (x64)
Doesn't require Python, Docker, or similar system-level dependencies
Doesn't rely on any essential platform-specific binaries. Engines are either ported via WebAssembly, imported using the ONNX runtime, or written in pure JavaScript

Feature highlights

Fast, high-quality offline text-to-speech voices based on the VITS neural architecture
Accurate offline speech recognition using OpenAI Whisper models
Supports synthesis and recognition via major cloud providers, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon
Word-level timestamps for all synthesis and recognition outputs
Speech-to-transcript alignment using dynamic time warping (DTW), and dynamic time warping with recognition assist (DTW-RA) methods
Advanced subtitle generation, accounting for sentence and phrase boundaries
Can transcribe speech in any one of 98 languages, translated directly to English, and produce near word-level synchronized subtitles for the translated transcript
Attempts to improve TTS pronunciation accuracy for a few engines and languages (currently only implemented for English dialects): adds text normalization (e.g. idiomatic date and currency pronunciation), heteronym disambiguation (based on a custom rule-based model) and user-customizable pronunciation lexicons
Internal package system that auto-downloads and installs voices, models and other resources, as needed
Other features include: language detection (both for audio and text), voice activity detection, and speech denoising

In development

Background worker
WebSocket-based server and API
Browser extension (for TTS only), including integration with the Web Speech API, and an advanced page reader enabling real-time narration of any page content, with live word highlighting
New, high-accuracy text language identification model (own work)

Planned, but not yet

Text enhancement, adding breaks to improve phrasing of synthesized text, as well as adding missing punctuation to recognized transcripts, if needed
Web-based UI
Real-time, streaming speech recognition

Maybe

Browser port for a subset of the API (in particular for the offline TTS models and their dependencies)

Installation

Ensure you have Node.js v16.0.0 or later installed.

then:

npm install echogarden -g

Additional tools:

sox: used for the CLI's audio playback and recording (only). Auto-installed via a package on Windows and Intel macOS. On Linux and ARM64 macOS, it is recommended to install it via platform package managers like apt and brew.
ffmpeg: used for codec conversions. Auto-installed via an expansion package on Windows, Intel macOS, and x64 Linux. On ARM64 macOS, it is recommended to install it via platform package manager like brew, otherwise, much slower ffmpeg-wasm would be used.

(hopefully in the future all platforms would be covered using expansion packages)

Updating to latest version

npm update echogarden -g

Next steps

Credits

This project consolidates, and builds upon the effort of many different individuals and companies, as well as contributing a number of original works.

Designed and developed by Rotem Dan.

License

GNU General Public License v3

Licenses for components, models and other dependencies are detailed on this page.