1.9 is out, with a lot of improvements! (Patreon)

1.9 is all about polishing the program to make it more reliable and performant, as well as preparing for new features coming in the next update. The UI update is a much needed change that will give me more room to add more features, and the settings saving across versions is there to make your lives easier when updating.

User Interface

There has been a complete redesign of the UI as well as new icons, colours and buttons. It is still undergoing many changes and it will be a progressive one as we roll out more and more updates. The UI was something we have been wanted to change quite a while ago but we always ended up not having enough time due to other pressing issues such as bug fixing, better translation, faster package delivery and many more thing inside our core program that needed our attention.

We have added a new design package that will improve the responsiveness and also make it more UI friendly. A feature that was asked from us a few months ago was the ability to make a small Speech To Text program that would only show the “Type Message” box, making it suitable for VTubers and other streamers using OBS and other streaming programs.

Multiple Profiles

As much as the tool was incredibly convenient for people speaking multiple languages it had an annoying downside. Having to change the AI language, voice and speaking style every time you wanted to switch synthetic voice was tedious. This was something that was brought to us a few months ago and we also wanted to implement. We had so much things that users were requesting that we had to leave that one aside until later. Now that we are doing a complete redesign of the UI, it is the most appropriate moment to finally include it!

ElevenLabs

3 days after our last post, we ended up adding ElevenLabs in our program. A new STTS option that became surprisingly very popular by streamers and other STTS enthusiasts. This STTS option functions relatively the same as TikTok where you need to create an ElevenLab account and link your API key inside the program. Once that is done, you can click on the “Reload Voices” button under the API Key field and it will import your ElevenLabs voices into the program. Those voices can be used if you select “Eleven Labs (English US)” from the language dropdown list found under the same tab.

Chinese Voices

We’ve been listening to you all for a long time, you’ve been asking for it and we finally have them! Users will now be able to select chinese for their Speech To Text as well as a range of up to 28 synthetic AI voices for the Text To Speech! Hopefully this will make a few of you happy as this was something that as been requested from us for quite a while.

Unity Shader

As always, we strive for simplicity and try to make it as easy for users as much as we possibly can. With the addition of Poiyomi (from our last blog post), more and more users have been wanting to customize their speech bubble for something a bit more unique. One thing we were missing was a quick button to show custom text to make customization easier in Unity.

Bug Fixing and a few more things...

Because with each new versions and new features implemented, new bugs makes their emergence. Here are a few major things that we were able to tackle in these two months.

• The program will now finally retain settings, even when updating to a new version!
• Lots of ElevenLabs debugging as a result of its implementation. Now a lot more reliable
• Added stability and clarity options for Eleven Labs voices
• Extended the Message Populating timeout animation so it can fully populate a full sized message
• A few translation issues fixed
• Deepgram in Default mode no longer crashes
• Deepgram no longer crashes if it doesn’t detect any voice output
• Voice selection in the STTS tab will no longer crash if you click too rapidly
• Fixed an issue with the website authentication causing the program to crash
• Fixed an authentication issue with Patreon relogin button and it not opening the discord window
• Starting recording is much more reliable
• Reduced the occurance of the dreaded second sentence delay. TTS will now queue the second sentence and beyond immediately.
• Fixed that annoying issue with anything past the second message in Azure not showing until way after you finish speaking.
• Fixed recording attempts where a connection timed out ocured and you had to wait for the 15 second timeout to finish before you could try recording again.
• Fixed an issue with program updates making it so the selected microphone is the wrong one

Special Mention

After everything is said, we would also like to give out a special mention to Hyeon and their customized Speech bubble that they are currently selling on Gumroad. We unfortunately are so busy with the program that our hands are tied in terms of free time and as much as we wish for it, we cannot currently allocate time dedicated into creating cool customized speech bubbles for everyone to enjoy.