Comment by echelon

This space is getting pretty crowded.

If you're going to drop weights on unsuspecting developers (who might not be familiar with TTS) and make them think that they'll fit their use case, that's a bit of a bait-and-switch.

Chatterbox TTS is only available over API for fine tunes. That's an incredibly saturated market, and there are better quality and cheaper models for this.

Chatterbox TTS is equivalent to already-released semi-open weights from ByteDance and other labs, and those models already sound and perform better.

It'd be truly exciting if Chatterbox fine tunes could be done as open weights, similar to how Flux operates. Black Forest Labs has an entire open weights ecosystem built around them. While they do withhold their pro / highest quality variants, they always release open weights with training code for each commercial release. That's a much better model for courting open source developers.

Another company doing "open weights" right is Lightricks with LTX-1. They have a commercial studio, but they release all of their weights and tuning code in the open.

I don't see how this is a carrot for open source. It's an ad for the hosted API.