This looks like an extreme point for AI-based TTS, as formant/tract modeling synths tend to be more accurate if you want TTS in a tiny amount of compute, but sound distinctly robotic.
TTS (neural diphone synth @ 16 kHz) ~1.8 MiB voice pack
This is in the realm of Microsoft Sam.
Presumably it's not, but the TTS voice in the video sounds to me more like formant synthesis than diphone - it reminds me of my DECtalk.
The project credits does mention espeak (which is formant based) as well as various other TTS projects, although it sounds like they are only using the pronunciation part of espeak, not the voice synthesis.
https://github.com/moonshine-ai/moonshine#acknowledgements
It certainly sounds similar, but seems more nimble with phonetic pronunciation in the demo.
Having it run on a pico would be pretty impressive =3
http://cmuflite.org/
https://github.com/festvox/flite
> Having it run on a pico would be pretty impressive
Yes, although relative to the DECTalk DTC01, a Pi Pico is a beast !
Pico : dual core ARM @ 133 MHz, 2MB flash, 264K RAM
DECTalk: 68000 @ 10 MHz + TMS 32010 @ 20 MHz (5 MIPS), 256K ROM, 64K RAM