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.
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.