README.md

# Parakeet

Parakeet aims to provide a flexible, efficient and state-of-the-art text-to-speech toolkit for the open-source community. It is built on PaddlePaddle Fluid dynamic graph and includes many influential TTS models proposed by [Baidu Research](http://research.baidu.com) and other research groups.  

In particular, it features the latest [WaveFlow] (https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.01219) model proposed by Baidu Research. WaveFlow is a small-footprint generative flow for raw audio, which is directly trained with maximum likelihood. It generates high-fidelity speech as WaveNet, while synthesizing serval orders of magnitude faster as it only requires a few sequential steps to generate very long waveforms. Furthermore, it can significantly reduce the likelihood gap that has existed between autoregressive models and flow-based models for efficient synthesis. Finally, our small-footprint WaveFlow has
only 5.9M parameters, which is 15 times smaller than WaveGlow. It can generate 22.05 kHz high-fidelity audio around 40 times faster than real-time on a V100 GPU without engineered inference kernels.

<div align="center">
  <img src="images/logo.png" width=450 /> <br>
</div>

### Setup

Make sure the library `libsndfile1` is installed, e.g., on Ubuntu.

```bash
sudo apt-get install libsndfile1
```

### Install PaddlePaddle

See [install](https://www.paddlepaddle.org.cn/install/quick) for more details. This repo requires paddlepaddle 1.7 or above.

### Install Parakeet

```bash
# git clone this repo first
cd Parakeet
pip install -e .
```

### Install CMUdict for nltk

CMUdict from nltk is used to transform text into phonemes.
```python
import nltk
nltk.download("punkt")
nltk.download("cmudict")
```


## Related Research

- [Deep Voice 3: Scaling Text-to-Speech with Convolutional Sequence Learning](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07654)
- [Neural Speech Synthesis with Transformer Network](https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08895)
- [FastSpeech: Fast, Robust and Controllable Text to Speech](https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.09263).
- [WaveFlow: A Compact Flow-based Model for Raw Audio](https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.01219)

## Examples

- [Train a DeepVoice3 model with ljspeech dataset](./examples/deepvoice3)
- [Train a TransformerTTS  model with ljspeech dataset](./examples/transformer_tts)
- [Train a FastSpeech model with ljspeech dataset](./examples/fastspeech)
- [Train a WaveFlow model with ljspeech dataset](./examples/waveflow)

## Copyright and License

Parakeet is provided under the [Apache-2.0 license](LICENSE).