Echogarden NPM

Echogarden

Echogarden is an easy-to-use speech toolset that includes a variety of speech processing tools.

Easy to install, run, and update
Runs on Windows (x64), macOS (x64, ARM64) and Linux (x64, ARM64)
Written in TypeScript, for the Node.js runtime
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, or written in pure JavaScript

Features

Text-to-speech using the VITS neural architecture, and 15 other offline and online engines, including cloud services by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI and Elevenlabs
Speech-to-text using OpenAI Whisper, and several other engines, including cloud services by Google, Microsoft, Amazon and OpenAI
Speech-to-transcript alignment using several variants of 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 supported by Whisper, to English, with near word-level timing for the translated transcript
Speech-to-translated-transcript alignment attempts to synchronize spoken audio in one language, to a provided English-translated transcript, using the Whisper engine
Language detection identifies the language of a given audio or text. Provides Whisper or Silero engines for audio, and TinyLD or FastText for text
Voice activity detection attempts to identify segments of audio where voice is active or inactive. Includes WebRTC VAD, Silero VAD, RNNoise-based VAD and a custom Adaptive Gate
Speech denoising attenuates background noise from spoken audio. Includes the RNNoise engine
Source separation isolates voice from any music or background ambience. Supports the 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
Internal package system that auto-downloads and installs voices, models and other resources, as needed

Installation

Ensure you have Node.js v18.0.0 or later installed.

then:

npm install echogarden -g

Additional required tools:

ffmpeg: used for codec conversions
sox: used for the CLI's audio playback

Both tools are auto-downloaded as internal packages on Windows and Linux.

On macOS, only ffmpeg is currently auto-downloaded. It is recommended to install sox via a system package manager like Homebrew (brew install sox) to ensure it is available on the system path.

Updating to latest version

npm update echogarden -g

Using the toolset

Tools are accessible via a command-line interface, which enables powerful customization and is especially useful for long-running bulk operations.

Development of more graphical and interactive tooling is planned. A text-to-speech browser extension is currently under development (but not released yet).

If you are a developer, you can also import the package as a module or interface with it via a local WebSocket service (currently experimental).

Documentation

Credits

This project consolidates, and builds upon the effort of many different individuals and companies, as well as contributing a number of original works.

Developed by Rotem Dan (IPA: /ˈʁɒːtem ˈdän/).