---
license: mit
language:
- en
library_name: mlx
pipeline_tag: text-to-speech
tags:
- nlp
- tts
- bark
---

## Model Summary

Bark is a transformer based text-to-audio model that can generate speech and miscellaneous audio i.e. background noise / music.

This is a port of Suno's Bark model in Apple's ML Framework, MLX. The intention of the port is to explore the potential in making fast on-device TTS inference possible.

This repository contains the Bark weights in `npz` format suitable for use with Apple's MLX Framework.

## Repo links

- [Original Repo](https://github.com/suno-ai/bark)
- [MLX Bark Repo](https://github.com/j-csc/mlx_bark)

## Usage

```bash
# Setup
pip install transformers huggingface_hub hf_transfer
git clone https://github.com/j-csc/mlx_bark
cd mlx_bark
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Download model
export HF_HUB_ENABLE_HF_TRANSFER=1
huggingface-cli download --local-dir-use-symlinks False --local-dir weights/ mlx-community/mlx_bark

# Run example (large model)
python model.py --text="Hello world!" --path weights/ --model large
```
The rest of the model card was copied from [the original Bark repository](https://huggingface.co/suno/bark)

## Model Details

The following is additional information about the models released here. 

Bark is a series of three transformer models that turn text into audio.

### Text to semantic tokens
 - Input: text, tokenized with [BERT tokenizer from Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/model_doc/bert#transformers.BertTokenizer)
 - Output: semantic tokens that encode the audio to be generated

### Semantic to coarse tokens
 - Input: semantic tokens
 - Output: tokens from the first two codebooks of the [EnCodec Codec](https://github.com/facebookresearch/encodec) from facebook

### Coarse to fine tokens
 - Input: the first two codebooks from EnCodec
 - Output: 8 codebooks from EnCodec

### Architecture
|           Model           | Parameters | Attention  | Output Vocab size |  
|:-------------------------:|:----------:|------------|:-----------------:|
|  Text to semantic tokens  |    80/300 M    | Causal     |       10,000      |
| Semantic to coarse tokens |    80/300 M    | Causal     |     2x 1,024      |
|   Coarse to fine tokens   |    80/300 M    | Non-causal |     6x 1,024      |


### Release date
April 2023

## Broader Implications
We anticipate that this model's text to audio capabilities can be used to improve accessbility tools in a variety of languages. 
 
While we hope that this release will enable users to express their creativity and build applications that are a force
for good, we acknowledge that any text to audio model has the potential for dual use. While it is not straightforward
to voice clone known people with Bark, it can still be used for nefarious purposes. To further reduce the chances of unintended use of Bark, 
we also release a simple classifier to detect Bark-generated audio with high accuracy (see notebooks section of the main repository).