Audine's tone is very nice. I like her voice a lot. I was also surprised by her fumbling of pronunciations and stresses though-- it could be a side-effect of the modifications/tools that are currently available for the backend, but it is interesting and strange. Not what I expected as far as an engine that purports to have such wide language support-- if anything, I expected Maghni to "over-correct" (or otherwise be overly precise) on pronunciations and stresses for language accuracy. Maybe the language preservation angle is less of a focus now, or the attainability of a near-universal cross-language model is being felt.
As expected and previously theorized in this thread, Maghni AI is not being released in 2024. They are retraining the base model and both Aurum and Audine.
The reasoning provided for the delay is that they want to support more languages, so everything needs to be retrained. I find this interesting. Is it because the engine lacks fundamental data for some sound, repetition, or phoneme? Are they adding a language that includes click consonants or something?
In general, I am curious why these new languages are secret when the existing (very large) language list was revealed upfront. Hype-generating mechanism??
I can only hope that this is something that they're doing because they now have the extra money and bandwidth to do so, and not because they are unsatisfied with the current results and feel they need to do something extra to "justify" the extra development time. If this were the case, that would be a dangerous prescident to set as feature creep risks introducing additional development risks and delays. Without knowing what the extra languages are, there's no way to theorize with any specificity what's going on, but again it is unsurprising that the delays have panned out in the way they have.
Hoping the next stretch of development goes well for them, curious what Audine will sound like in a before-and-after setting after everything is overhauled.