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Will this run on CPU? (as opposed to GPU)
Could it run on Macbook? Just on GPU device?
I don’t understand the approach

> TADA takes a different path. Instead of compressing audio into fewer fixed-rate frames of discrete audio tokens, we align audio representations directly to text tokens — one continuous acoustic vector per text token. This creates a single, synchronized stream where text and speech move in lockstep through the language model.

So basically just concatenating the audio vectors without compression or discretization?

I haven’t read the full paper yet (I know, I should before commenting), but this explanation puzzles me.

To me, the speech sounds impressively expressive, but there is something off about the audio quality that I can't quite put my finger on.

The "Anger Speech" has an obvious lisp (Maybe a homage to Elmer Fudd?). But I hear a similar, but more subtle, speech impediment in the "Adoration Speech". The "Fearful Speech" might have a slight warble to it. And the "Long Speech" is difficult to evaluate because the speaker has vocal fry to an extent that I find annoying.

There's a subtle modulation that happens on all of the samples. It sounds almost like some kind of harmonic or phase shift? This is something I notice with every AI generated speech out there.
"Long speech" is a faithful synthesis of a fairly irritating modern American English speech pattern.
the 0.09 RTF is wild but i wonder how much of that speed advantage disappears once you need voice cloning or fine grained prosody control. i use cartesia sonic for TTS in a video pipeline and the thing that actually matters for content creation isnt raw speed - its whether you can get consistent emotional delivery across like 50+ scenes without it drifting. the 1:1 text-acoustic alignment should help with hallucinations for sure but does it handle things like mid-sentence pauses or emphasis on specific words? thats where most open source TTS falls apart IMO
okay so they say text continuation only without fine tuning. I assume that means that we can't use it as a replacement for TTS in an AI agent chat? Because it will not work without enough context?

Could you maybe trick it into thinking it was continuing a sample for an assistant use case if the sample was generic enough?

I appreciate them being honest about it though because otherwise I might spend two days trying to make it work.

What this means is that it does not support things like acting instructions or creating a voice from a text description. If you prompt it with a matching text+voice sample it will be able to generate more speech based on more text, just like a TTS. It can also generate it's own text on the fly but it won't be as good as your frontier model.