A Hobbyist Made AI Voices 100x Faster on a Home PC
This means faster, cheaper voice AI for everyone—no fancy lab needed.
Deep Dive
A web developer describes training something in his basement on a 4070 Ti Super over about a day, starting from an idea he saw in a tweet by Sahil about how to distill Kokoro in the first place. He says he doesn't fully understand how it works, but his thinking was that models — especially Opus — can hill-climb as long as you give them something achievable and a clear metric to improve on. He calls it "Opus slop" but says it's really cool that something he thought was only possible for an ML engineer is now available to a run-of-the-mill web dev.
Key Points
- A non-expert used an AI model to make an open-source voice system 50–100x faster on a home PC.
- This could lead to cheaper, more accessible voice AI for apps like audiobooks and assistants.
- The method might not be easily reproducible and could have quality trade-offs.
Why It Matters
Faster, cheaper voice AI means better voice assistants and audiobooks for everyone, without expensive hardware.