Hacker News: Gcarter08

New comment by Gcarter08 in "Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English"

Gcarter08 — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 23:45:43 +0000

Yea I tried to squeeze info into the title - could def be better. But no this is referencing the southern states in America.

New comment by Gcarter08 in "Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English"

Gcarter08 — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 23:43:52 +0000

Yes those are the ones for this model that performed consistently well.

New comment by Gcarter08 in "Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English"

Gcarter08 — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 23:43:16 +0000

Yes, exactly. This version focuses on giving the ability to consistently represent those voices well. The future versions will be even more fine-grained where you can scope it even more detailed if you wanted.

For example, right now if you say you want a Southern American accent, you might get a voice that is a Black person from Atlanta or Rural Georgia in future versions you will be able to specify Atlanta or rural, etc.. same with the regional African accents.

New comment by Gcarter08 in "Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English"

Gcarter08 — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 23:38:43 +0000

Good question, those are all different accents we are pointing out this model does well with, but it also does well with White American accents that are usually represented well, not only the Black voices (including White southern voices).

We are calling out Southern American, and the regional African English (e.g. a person with a regional Nigerian (igbo) accent speaking english, or someone with a regional Kenya (Swahili) accent that is still speaking english). Those are all different but all represented well in this model.

Those were not a catch all for black americans.

New comment by Gcarter08 in "Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English"

Gcarter08 — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 23:32:17 +0000

thank you.. and agreed - that's why we decided to work on this because the tech is fascinating, but the representation is far behind. We have commercial rights for the data - that allowed us to create eval datasets but also build models.

New comment by Gcarter08 in "Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English"

Gcarter08 — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 23:29:58 +0000

lol and there is more to come... we have more data, and can create even more fine grained controls for the model outputs

New comment by Gcarter08 in "Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English"

Gcarter08 — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 23:27:49 +0000

Thanks for the tip, I will look into it. We wanted to broaden the model to include voices and accents from regions I don't typically hear or they might sound comical or like a caricature

New comment by Gcarter08 in "Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English"

Gcarter08 — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 23:24:30 +0000

You can try this link to the huggingface spaces page https://huggingface.co/spaces/destined/hurston-1

I also have a demo phone line 678.940.8800 with a few of the voices

Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English

Gcarter08 — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 01:30:13 +0000

Hey HN, I’m open sourcing my Hurston-1 narrowband TTS model (Apache-2.0). It is very good with American English and does especially well with Southern American and Regional African English accents. Destined AI is based in Atlanta, and I built this because I’m amazed by what AI can do, and I wanted to help introduce and welcome more people to feel comfortable using and interacting with AI.

Since 2021, I’ve been collecting fully consented voice data from over 20,000 people, 1M audio recordings, and over 1,800 hrs of audio captured to date. For this model, I used a small part of the data, 136 hrs, to finetune Maya1 and expand it’s capabilities.

Hurston-1 is a narrowband TTS model that focuses the output on telephone use because that is still where most of these voices will be heard. I’ve used it to support customers such as Amazon and Salesforce and generated over half-mill revenue with it. Now I’m open sourcing it to help unlock opportunities for others as well.

Limitations: this model doesn’t maintain the exact same voice across prompts and doesn’t support voice cloning. For many use cases, this is fine but maybe not so - if you’re creating podcasts.

This is the first release - I’m already working on the next version with improvements.

I would appreciate, if anyone is interested in this space, download the model from huggingface, check it out and let me know any feedback. Also, open to connecting with others in this space as well.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50227330

Points: 68

# Comments: 26

New comment by Gcarter08 in "Adobe is buying videos for $3 per minute to build AI model"

Gcarter08 — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 20:52:50 +0000

There will be some creators who will take this deal…tends to be the high volume producers who will see this as a pure numbers game. As a creator myself who licenses content for AI, this would be a lot lower than our going rate, so I’d pass.