discord-wavenet

A very stupid Discord bot that will play TTS into a voice channel using audio synthesized by the full might of Google Wavenet. Millions of dollars of R&D, who knows how many man-hours, the sweat and tears of countless ML PH.ds, for this.

Why?

"I can't understand anything Hawking says, and you keep making it say really dumb things." -- @chrissprague 2021

Building

You will need:

• Rust 1.59 or newer
• Opus development libraries installed (libopus-dev on Debian-alikes, opus-devel on RHEL-alikes)
• ffmpeg

After that you can simply run cargo build and it should all work itself out naturally.

Running

You will need your Discord bot API token as well as a Google API token. You will also need to make sure you have a credit card in your Google cloud developer console and that you have a text to speech project set up and ready.

Once you have those two things, it's very easy to run the bot. The tokens are passed into the bot via environment variables.

Via the command line

export DISCORD_TOKEN=<Discord token goes here>
export GOOGLE_API_CREDENTIALS=<Path to file containing Google API JSON goes here>
export DISCORD_APPLICATION_ID=<Discord application ID>
export APPLICATION_COMMAND_PREFIX=<your bot's name>
cargo run --release

Via the Docker container

docker run -e "DISCORD_TOKEN=<Discord token goes here>" -e "GOOGLE_API_CREDENTIALS=<Path to file containing Google API JSON goes here>" -e "DISCORD_APPLICATION_ID=<Discord application id>" -e "APPLICATION_COMMAND_PREFIX=<your bot's name>" --rm -it ghcr.io/sriramanujam/discord-wavenet:latest

Doesn't using Wavenet cost money?

Yes, but the first million characters a month are free. This is why I have no intention of hosting this bot publicly somewhere. It would most likely bankrupt me. Anyone interested in hosting the bot on their own Discord servers should judge very carefully whether they will be able to consistently stay under the 1 million character limit.

Having said that, though, a million characters is a lot. For reference, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is 448,821 characters long. You could get the bot to read out Frankenstein twice and still have 102,358 characters left over every month, forever, without paying Google a single cent. I wouldn't be too worried.