Hey!
I caught wind of an emerging service, ElevenAI, that allows you to submit clean voice samples and then produce an eerily accurate TTS from them.
Once you’ve trained a “voice” with some samples, you’re able to forward-synthesize arbitrary text in a web UI and download the resulting MP3. There is also a fairly extensive API for automating these operations.
I saw a promo for a free month of the “starter tier”, so I played with it on Saturday morning and ultimately updated the goontube chat bot’s $tts command to use this API with a Dagoth Ur voice.
Users seemed to love Dagoth’s narrations and the “token quota” was quickly exhausted throughout the course of the day, completely so by the time I went to bed. 
ElevenAI’s pricing tiers are based on “tokens”, which are the number of characters submitted in a TTS request. I will summarize them here in USD:
- free: 10,000 characters per month
- $5 / mo: starter (what we had/have a trial of) / 40,000 characters per month
- $22 / mo: creator / 100,000 characters per month
- $99 / mo: independent publisher / 500,000 characters per month
- $330 / mo: growing business / 2,000,000 characters per month (they say this works out to about 40 hours of audio)
While I am happy to continue eating the costs of the platform & hosting regardless of donations, going overboard on auxiliary content features like this one on an optional chat bot is getting pretty far away from that core.
What am I going to do with the bot to ensure we can sort of continue to enjoy this feature without suddenly paying more for funny voices than the hosting itself is:
- I will get us the “creator” tier for now to get a new quota at 100K characters, anything above that feels excessive IMO.
- Update the bot to report the exhausted % of the TTS quota and to throw an abort error chat message if the quota has been exceeded, rather than write & chat an invalid empty MP3 file in this case. We observed this last night at first encounter with quota exhaustion.
- The
$ttsuse will be rate-limited like$dream, but not for quite so long. - The same exception username list for
$dreamcontent will apply to$tts. We will be on the honour system here, but obviously you/chat will know if you’re ripping through 100% of the quota and then would lose it so just play nice and enjoy the occasional Dagoth ok? - As a workaround, and to be fair to myself, if somebody wants a few extra tokens and we’re still blowing through the creator tier, then they are more than welcome to register an ElevenAI account, get a service tier, and privately send me an API key for the bot to use.
But we’re good to start. - A
$voicecommand will be added to the bot that sets a per-user choice of a$ttsvoice. The default will remain Dagoth Ur, but$voicewill take the arguments:dagothordentonto begin with, and we can add more fairly easily. - General quotas can be revisited/relaxed as the novelty and usage dies down.
Anyways, the last parts of the above will take effect within a few hours and the improved TTS will be available again. 
