The biggest challenge with TTS is high quality voice data. The architectures of closed providers still mostly trace their roots to stuff like Tortoise with a few exceptions.
Which is why it's especially ridiculous ElevenLabs allows professionals to upload their voices, charges users of those voices a minimum of $50 per million characters, likely pays under $1 for the compute... and then passes on a whopping $2 back to the professional.
I think the next disruptive TTS competitor is going to form out of just offering to pay better rates than ElevenLabs to their PVC users.
Finetuning established architectures on cleaner synthetic data is already getting open source models increasingly competitive, so getting top PVC samples from the source would likely put you right about where they are today.
Which is why it's especially ridiculous ElevenLabs allows professionals to upload their voices, charges users of those voices a minimum of $50 per million characters, likely pays under $1 for the compute... and then passes on a whopping $2 back to the professional.
I think the next disruptive TTS competitor is going to form out of just offering to pay better rates than ElevenLabs to their PVC users.
Finetuning established architectures on cleaner synthetic data is already getting open source models increasingly competitive, so getting top PVC samples from the source would likely put you right about where they are today.