Baidu Text-to-Speech vs ESPnet
Baidu Text-to-Speech
cloud.baidu.com
ESPnet
espnet.github.ioSide by side
| Figure | Baidu Text-to-Speech | ESPnet |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 14 | 2 |
| Spec score · Text-to-Speech Software | 9.3 (#3) | 8.9 (#17) |
| Spec score · Text-to-speech tools | 9.3 (#5) | 8.8 (#28) |
| API access | Yes | Yes |
| Export formats | mp3,pcm,wav | WAV |
| Founded | 2000 | 2018 |
| Platforms | web,api,ios,android,linux | The installation guide lists Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Windows 10, and macOS 12 as supported distributions or systems, with Windows and macOS marked installation only. |
| Purpose | Converts text into natural-sounding speech for applications and devices. | ESPnet is an end-to-end speech processing toolkit for speech recognition, text-to-speech, speech translation, speech enhancement, speaker diarization, spoken language understanding, and more. |
| Voice cloning | Yes | No |
Plans
Baidu Text-to-Speech
- Short-text Basic Voice LibraryPrice not published
- Short-text Premium Voice LibraryPrice not published
- Short-text Large-model and Premium Voice LibraryPrice not published
- Long-text Basic Voice LibraryPrice not published
- Long-text Premium Voice LibraryPrice not published
- Long-text Large-model and Premium Voice LibraryPrice not published
- Streaming Basic Voice LibraryPrice not published
- Streaming Premium Voice LibraryPrice not published
- Streaming Large-model and Premium Voice LibraryPrice not published
- 离线语音合成试用版Free
In their own words
Baidu Text-to-Speech
Baidu Text-to-Speech converts text into speech for applications and devices, with Chinese, English, mixed Chinese-English, and more than 70 voice styles available through its online service. Users can change speech rate, pitch, volume, and supported emotional effects; Chinese polyphonic characters can be annotated with pronunciation. Streaming synthesis can play audio nearly as text is entered, and long-text synthesis handles up to 100,000 Chinese characters in one request. Baidu provides HTTP and WebSocket APIs, online and offline SDKs, and Android and iOS SDKs for phones and smart devices. Offline synthesis is intended for settings with weak or no network access, including mobile apps, readers, robots, and smart hardware. Listed uses include audiobook reading, news and order announcements, and smart hardware. Short-text API requests must stay under 1,024 GBK bytes, with 120 bytes or less recommended. Export formats are MP3, PCM, and WAV. The service offers a free trial; offline trial and license plans are listed, while prices for other listed plans are not provided.
ESPnet
ESPnet is an open-source toolkit for speech processing, including recognition, text-to-speech, translation, enhancement, speaker diarization, and spoken language understanding. It provides complete recipes for a range of tasks, plus tutorials, notebooks, and demos for existing models. Users can install ESPnet and espnet-model-zoo with pip to run inference on existing models; published models can also run in CPU or GPU inference containers without checking out the repository. Installation supports editable pip setup and optional dependency groups for tasks such as ASR, TTS, and speech enhancement. Training requires a separate extra that includes Lightning, TensorBoard, W&B, torch_optimizer, matplotlib, and Dask. Some task-specific packages must also be installed separately when a recipe needs them. ESPnet 1 is no longer supported, while ESPnet2 users can skip installing Kaldi. The toolkit is released under Apache License 2.0 and permits commercial use. It offers API access and lists Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted platforms; WAV is the listed export format.