echogarden 2.1.1 → 2.2.0

package/README.md

@@ -4,14 +4,15 @@ Echogarden is an easy-to-use speech toolset that includes a variety of speech pr
 
 * Easy to install, run, and update
 * Written in TypeScript, for the Node.js runtime
-* Can be used either as a command-line utility, or imported as an `npm` package
+* Can be used either as a command-line utility, or imported as a standard `npm` package
 * Runs on Windows (x64, ARM64), macOS (x64, ARM64) and Linux (x64, ARM64)
 * Doesn't require Python, Docker, or other system-level dependencies
-* Doesn't rely on essential platform-specific binaries. Engines are either ported via WebAssembly, imported using the [ONNX runtime](https://onnxruntime.ai/), or written in pure TypeScript
+* Doesn't rely on essential platform-specific binaries. Engines are either written in pure TypeScript, ported via WebAssembly, or imported using the [ONNX runtime](https://onnxruntime.ai/)
+* Fully open-source (GPL v3)
 
 ## Features
 
-* **Text-to-speech** using high-quality [Kokoro](https://github.com/hexgrad/kokoro) and [VITS](https://github.com/jaywalnut310/vits) offline voices, for many languages and dialects, and [16 other offline and online engines](docs/Engines.md), including cloud services by [Google](https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech), [Microsoft](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-services/text-to-speech/), [Amazon](https://aws.amazon.com/polly/), [OpenAI](https://platform.openai.com/) and [Elevenlabs](https://elevenlabs.io/)
+* **Text-to-speech** using high-quality [Kokoro](https://github.com/hexgrad/kokoro) and [VITS](https://github.com/jaywalnut310/vits) offline models for many languages and dialects, and [16 other offline and online engines](docs/Engines.md), including cloud services by [Google](https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech), [Microsoft](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-services/text-to-speech/), [Amazon](https://aws.amazon.com/polly/), [OpenAI](https://platform.openai.com/) and [Elevenlabs](https://elevenlabs.io/)
 * **Speech-to-text** using a custom TypeScript/ONNX port of the [OpenAI Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper) speech recognition architecture, [whisper.cpp](https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp), and [several other engines](docs/Engines.md), including cloud services by [Google](https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text), [Microsoft](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-services/speech-to-text/), [Amazon](https://aws.amazon.com/transcribe/) and [OpenAI](https://platform.openai.com/)
 * **Speech-to-transcript alignment** using several variants of [dynamic time warping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_time_warping) (DTW, DTW-RA), including support for multi-pass (hierarchical) processing, or via guided decoding using Whisper recognition models. Supports 100+ languages
 * **Speech-to-text translation**, translates speech in any of the [98 languages](https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/speech-to-text/supported-languages) supported by Whisper, to English, with near word-level timing for the translated transcript
@@ -21,33 +22,36 @@ Echogarden is an easy-to-use speech toolset that includes a variety of speech pr
 * **Language detection** identifies the language of a given audio or text. Includes Whisper or [Silero](https://github.com/snakers4/silero-vad/wiki/Other-Models) engines for spoken audio, and [TinyLD](https://www.npmjs.com/package/tinyld) or [FastText](https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText) for text
 * **Voice activity detection** attempts to identify segments of audio where voice is active or inactive. Includes [WebRTC VAD](https://github.com/dpirch/libfvad), [Silero VAD](https://github.com/snakers4/silero-vad), [RNNoise-based VAD](https://github.com/xiph/rnnoise) and a built-in Adaptive Gate algorithm
 * **Speech denoising** attenuates background noise from spoken audio. Includes the [RNNoise](https://github.com/xiph/rnnoise) and [NSNet2](https://github.com/NeonGeckoCom/nsnet2-denoiser) engines
-* **Source separation** isolates voice from any music or background ambience. Supports the [MDX-NET](https://github.com/kuielab/mdx-net) deep learning architecture
+* **Source separation** isolates voice from any music or background ambience. Includes the [MDX-NET](https://github.com/kuielab/mdx-net) deep learning architecture
 * **Word-level timestamps** for all recognition, synthesis, alignment and translation outputs
 * Advanced **subtitle generation**, accounting for sentence and phrase boundaries
-* For the VITS and eSpeak-NG synthesis engines, includes **enhancements to improve TTS pronunciation accuracy**: adds text normalization (e.g. idiomatic date and currency pronunciation), heteronym disambiguation (based on a rule-based model) and user-customizable pronunciation lexicons
+* For the Kokoro, VITS and eSpeak-NG synthesis engines, includes **enhancements to improve TTS pronunciation accuracy**: adds text normalization (e.g. idiomatic date and currency pronunciation), English heteronym disambiguation (based on a simple rule-based model), various pronunciation corrections, and accepts user-provided pronunciation lexicons
 * **Internal package system** that auto-downloads and installs voices, models and other resources, as needed
 
 ## Installation
 
-Ensure you have [Node.js](https://nodejs.org/) `v18.16.0` or later installed.
+Ensure you have [Node.js](https://nodejs.org/) `v18` or later installed (`v22` or later is recommended).
 
 then:
 ```bash
-npm install echogarden -g
+npm install -g echogarden@latest
 ```
 
-### Updating to latest version
+## Update
 
+You can use [`npm-check-updates`](https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm-check-updates) to check for a newer version:
 ```bash
-npm update echogarden -g
+npm install -g npm-check-updates
+ncu -g echogarden
 ```
+Then, if an updated version is available, use the command line `ncu` provides to make the update.
 
 ## Using the command-line interface
 
 A small sample of command lines:
 ```bash
 echogarden speak "Hello World!"
-echogarden speak-file story.txt
+echogarden speak-file story.txt --engine=kokoro
 echogarden transcribe speech.mp3
 echogarden translate-speech speech.webm subtitles.srt
 echogarden align speech.opus transcript.txt
@@ -56,18 +60,17 @@ echogarden isolate speech.wav
 
 See the [command-line interface guide](docs/CLI.md) for more details on the operations supported, and the [configuration options reference](docs/Options.md) for a comprehensive list of all options supported.
 
-**Note**: on `v2.0.0`, a [newly developed audio playback library](https://github.com/echogarden-project/audio-io) was integrated into the command line interface. If you're having trouble hearing sound, or the sound is distorted, please [report this as an issue](https://github.com/echogarden-project/audio-io/issues). You can also switch back to the older [SoX](https://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/)-based player by adding `--player=sox` to the command-line. On macOS, you'll need to ensure SoX is available on the system path by installing it with a system package manager like [Homebrew](https://brew.sh/) (`brew install sox`).
-
 ## Using the Node.js API
 
-If you are a developer, you can also [directly import the package as a dependency](docs/API.md). The API operations and options closely mirror the CLI.
+If you are a developer, you can also [directly import the package as a dependency](docs/API.md) in your code. The API operations and options closely mirror the CLI.
 
-## Documentation
+## Documentation and guides
 
 * [Quick guide to the command-line interface](docs/CLI.md)
 * [Options reference](docs/Options.md)
-* [Full list of supported engines](docs/Engines.md)
+* [Full list of all available engines](docs/Engines.md)
 * [Node.js API reference](docs/API.md)
+* [Enabling the CUDA ONNX execution provider](docs/CUDA.md)
 * [Technical overview and Q&A](docs/Technical.md)
 * [How to help](docs/Contributing.md)
 * [Setting up a development environment](docs/Development.md)