jzj / echogarden

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

Echogarden

Echogarden is an integrated speech toolset that provides a variety of synthesis, recognition, alignment, and other processing tools, designed to be directly accessible to end-users:

• Easy to install, run, and update
• Runs on Windows (x64), macOS (x64, ARM64) and Linux (x64)
• Written in TypeScript, for the Node.js runtime
• 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 multilingual text-to-speech voices based on the VITS neural architecture
• Accurate offline speech recognition using OpenAI Whisper models
• Supports a large variety of offline and cloud engines, including services by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Elevenlabs and others
• 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, including support for multi-pass (hierarchical) processing. Supports 100+ languages.
• Advanced subtitle generation, accounting for sentence and phrase boundaries
• Can directly generate translated transcripts for 98 languages, transcribed directly to English, and produce near word-level synchronized subtitles for the translated transcript
• Attempts to improve TTS pronunciation accuracy on some engines: adds text normalization (e.g. idiomatic date and currency pronunciation), heteronym disambiguation (based on a 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 (for both audio and text), voice activity detection, and speech denoising

Installation

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

then:

npm install echogarden -g

Additional required tools:

• ffmpeg: used for codec conversions
• sox: used for the CLI's audio playback and recording

Both tools are auto-downloaded as internal packages on Windows and Linux.

On macOS, they are not currently auto-downloaded due to security issues with unsigned binaries. It is recommended to install them via a package manager like Homebrew (brew install ffmpeg sox) and ensure they are available on the system path.

Updating to latest version

npm update echogarden -g

Interfacing with the system

Currently, tools are accessible mainly through a command-line interface, which enables powerful customization and is especially useful for long-running bulk operations.

Development of more graphical and interactive tooling is currently ongoing.

If you are a developer, you can also import the package as a module or interface with it via a WebSocket service.

Guides and resource pages

• Using the command-line interface
• Options reference
• Full list of supported engines
• Developer API reference
• Starting and interfacing with a WebSocket server
• Technical overview and Q&A
• Developer's task list
• How to help

Credits

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

Developed by Rotem Dan (IPA: /ˈʁɒːtem ˈdän/).

License

GNU General Public License v3

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