echogarden 0.0.1 → 0.1.1

package/README.md

@@ -2,4 +2,68 @@
 
 An integrated speech toolbox designed with end-users in mind.
 
-_This is a placeholder for the Echogarden library and command-line tool. It will be published soon._
+* Written in TypeScript, for the Node.js platform
+* Easy to install, run and update
+* Runs on Windows (x64), macOS (x64, ARM64) and Linux (x64)
+* Does not require Python, Docker, or any other system-level dependencies
+* No essential platform-specific binary executables. Engines are ported via WebAssembly or the [ONNX runtime](https://onnxruntime.ai/)
+
+## Feature highlights
+
+* Fast, high-quality offline text-to-speech voices based on the [VITS](https://github.com/jaywalnut310/vits) neural architecture
+* Accurate offline speech recognition using [OpenAI Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper) models
+* Supports synthesis and recognition via major cloud providers, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon
+* Word-level timestamps for all synthesis and recognition outputs
+* Speech-to-transcript alignment using dynamic time warping (DTW), and dynamic time warping with recognition assist (DTW-RA) methods
+* Advanced subtitle generation, accounting for sentence and phrase boundaries
+* Can transcribe speech in any one of 98 languages, translated directly to English, and produce near word-level synchronized subtitles
+* Uses NLP for improving TTS pronunciation accuracy on a few engines and languages: adds text normalization (e.g. idiomatic date and currency pronunciation), heteronym disambiguation (based on POS tagging) and user-customizable phonetic lexicons
+* Internal package system to auto-download and install voices, models and other resources, as needed
+* Other features include: language detection (both for audio and text), voice activity detection and speech denoising
+
+## Planned, but not yet
+
+* Real-time, streaming speech recognition
+* WebSocket server API
+* Web-based GUI frontend
+* Browser port for a subset of the API (in particular for the offline TTS models and their dependencies)
+
+## Installation
+
+Ensure you have [Node.js](https://nodejs.org/) `v16.0.0` or later installed.
+
+then:
+```bash
+npm install echogarden -g
+```
+
+Additional tools:
+* [`sox`](https://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/): used for playback and recording only. Auto-installed via an expansion package on Windows and Intel macOS. On Linux and ARM64 macOS, it is recommended to install it via platform package managers like `apt` and `brew`.
+* [`ffmpeg`](https://ffmpeg.org/download.html): used for codec conversions. Auto-installed via an expansion package on Windows, Intel macOS, and Linux. On ARM64 macOS, it is recommended to install it via platform package manager like `brew`, otherwise, much slower `ffmpeg-wasm` would be used.
+
+(hopefully in the future all platforms would be covered using expansion packages)
+
+## Updating to latest version
+
+```bash
+npm update echogarden -g
+```
+
+## Next steps
+
+* [Using the command line interface](docs/CLI.md)
+* [Options reference](docs/Options.md)
+* [Full list of supported engines](docs/Engines.md)
+* [Technical overview and Q&A](docs/Technical.md)
+* [Roadmap](docs/Roadmap.md)
+* [How to help](docs/Development.md)
+
+## Credits
+
+This project consolidates and builds upon the work of [many different individuals and companies](docs/Licenses.md).
+
+Designed and developed by Rotem Dan.
+
+## License
+
+GNU General Public License v3