VoxCPM/docs/usage_guide.md

👩‍🍳 A Voice Chef's Guide

Welcome to the VoxCPM kitchen! Follow this recipe to cook up perfect generated speech. Let's begin.

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🥚 Step 1: Prepare Your Base Ingredients (Content)

First, choose how you'd like to input your text:

1. Regular Text (Classic Mode)

• ✅ Keep "Text Normalization" ON. Type naturally (e.g., "Hello, world! 123"). The system will automatically process numbers, abbreviations, and punctuation using WeTextProcessing library.

2. Phoneme Input (Native Mode)

• ❌ Turn "Text Normalization" OFF. Enter phoneme text like {HH AH0 L OW1} (EN) or {ni3}{hao3} (ZH) for precise pronunciation control. In this mode, VoxCPM also supports native understanding of other complex non-normalized text—try it out!
• Phoneme Conversion: For Chinese, phonemes are converted using pinyin. For English, phonemes are converted using CMUDict. Please refer to the relevant documentation for more details.

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🍳 Step 2: Choose Your Flavor Profile (Voice Style)

This is the secret sauce that gives your audio its unique sound.

1. Cooking with a Prompt Speech (Following a Famous Recipe)

• A prompt speech provides the desired acoustic characteristics for VoxCPM. The speaker's timbre, speaking style, and even the background sounds and ambiance will be replicated.
• For a Clean, Studio-Quality Voice:
  • ✅ Enable "Prompt Speech Enhancement". This acts like a noise filter, removing background hiss and rumble to give you a pure, clean voice clone.

2. Cooking au Naturel (Letting the Model Improvise)

• If no reference is provided, VoxCPM becomes a creative chef! It will infer a fitting speaking style based on the text itself, thanks to the text-smartness of its foundation model, MiniCPM-4.
• Pro Tip: Challenge VoxCPM with any text—poetry, song lyrics, dramatic monologues—it may deliver some interesting results!

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🧂 Step 3: The Final Seasoning (Fine-Tuning Your Results)

You're ready to serve! But for master chefs who want to tweak the flavor, here are two key spices.

CFG Value (How Closely to Follow the Recipe)

• Default: A great starting point.
• Voice sounds strained or weird? Lower this value. It tells the model to be more relaxed and improvisational, great for expressive prompts.
• Need maximum clarity and adherence to the text? Raise it slightly to keep the model on a tighter leash.
• Short sentences? Consider increasing the CFG value for better clarity and adherence.
• Long texts? Consider lowering the CFG value to improve stability and naturalness over extended passages.

Inference Timesteps (Simmering Time: Quality vs. Speed)

• Need a quick snack? Use a lower number. Perfect for fast drafts and experiments.
• Cooking a gourmet meal? Use a higher number. This lets the model "simmer" longer, refining the audio for superior detail and naturalness.

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Happy creating! 🎉 Start with the default settings and tweak from there to suit your project. The kitchen is yours!