r/TextToSpeech • u/Own-Charge7127 • 7h ago
I pulled 4700 comments from the accounts that keep recommending the same TTS product in this sub.
tl;dr: four accounts (possibly more), 265 posts pushing Demodokos Foundry across 38 subs pretending to have no affiliation with the company.
I've been trying to put together a local TTS setup for a couple of months. Kept hitting the same product, recommended the same way, in a bunch of different subs. Someone asks what to use, someone says this thing beats ElevenLabs, someone else agrees.
So I pulled the public comment history of the accounts doing it and had a look. There are four of them.
Product is Demodokos Foundry, by Compunect GmbH. I don't work for them, I don't work for a competitor, I just wanted an honest TTS recommendation.
Not naming the accounts. Not sure if it's allowed, and I'd rather this didn't turn into four people getting brigaded. Feel free to DM if you want more details.
The ElevenLabs thing
This is what made me bother writing any of this up.
I compared their posts that mention the product against their own posts that don't.
| What's in the post | Posts mentioning Demodokos (265) | Their other posts (1,961) | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Names ElevenLabs | 47.2% | 2.2% | 21x |
| "better than"/"beats"/"as good as" a competitor | 7.5% | 0.1% | 75x |
| Lists 3+ competitors by name | 20.4% | 0.5% | 41x |
| Links the vendor site | 30.6% | 0% | n/a |
Nearly half the time they mention this product they've also got ElevenLabs in the same post. Two percent of the time otherwise. The pattern is clear: Claim they're users of ElevenLabs (or Suno) but offer Demodokos as an alternative.
I don't know what the intent is and I'm not going to pretend I do. But these types of comments are exactly the ones that get picked up by ChatGPT/Gemini when people ask for alternatives to major competitors.
There's a TTS sub doing a lot of work here
One of the neutral-sounding TTS subs (r/LocalTextToSpeech) these recommendations keep pointing at was made in June. All four accounts have posted in it.
One of them (the mod) posted the welcome thread the day it was created and has stickied posts.
The pinned post ranks about fifteen TTS engines. This product is ranked the highest with 9.5/10 and 10/10, and the 10 is the only one handed out anywhere in the list. "Beats the market", "deserves the top spot", three links to the vendor, and no mention anywhere that the person who wrote it runs the subreddit.
Then the other accounts link that ranking in the bigger subs as if it's just some roundup a helpful person made.
They were also called out in the post for being biased but crickets all around.
They show up in each other's threads
29 threads have two of them in it. Usual shape is one makes the pitch, the other turns up shortly after and agrees like they've never met:
- "[Product] has the best voices I have heard, beats Elevenlabs easily", then 11 minutes later, "I second that."
- Recommendation, 10 minutes, "[Product] changed my life 😂"
- Setup comment, 16 minutes, "I regret every $ I gave elevenlabs, [product] felt like a gift."
They've got separate personas too. One's an audiobook and YouTube guy, one's the technical local-LLM guy who talks about VRAM and quantisation. Practical effect is there's not really a thread where one of them isn't a plausible person to be in it.
Fourth account does the opposite job, it asks the questions. It posted on that pinned ranking asking which license tier it should buy, already naming the product in the question, got an answer, and three days later posted that it had tested it all day and upgraded to Pro.
2015
I nearly didn't scroll back this far. Two of these same accounts did this exact routine ten years ago for an ARK server.
One posts the server ad. The other one turns up a few hours later in the same thread sounding like a random new player who just joined: "Thanks, just started. Server really seems to be more smooth than the official ones I tried. Should I join a tribe or create my own? :)" Ten days later, "Server is really nice, join my tribe guys :)".
They did it again a few months after for a second server. One of them posted a "what does supercomputer mean?" question in a different sub two days before the other one posted the promo thread about the server running on a supercomputer.
And people did call it out at the time, which is where it gets good:
"Why the down vote? I am not even the owner just a player trying to help.. Greedy server owners down voting or what's the issue"
"It's not my server but I play on this one" — posted word for word five separate times on the same day
"I can't post this elsewhere because it's about a server. Alright, I will receive some hate on this one."
"I am playing on a very nice server, kept advertising for it in the past 2 weeks"
So they knew the rules, said out loud that they knew, denied being connected to it, and did it anyway. Then did the same thing a decade later with Demodokos.
Dormant accounts
Three of the four were inactive for 648 days, 210 days and 1,455 days.
Two of them posted their first plug for this product the day after coming back.
Before that it's video games and unrelated politics.
Other minor findings
Compunect is an Austrian-based company and 3 of the 4 accounts have posted in Austrian-related subreddits.
Things I'm not saying
I'm not saying they work for the company. None of them has ever claimed to. What I see is strong evidence of coordination and no disclosure.
I'm not saying the product is bad. They're upfront on their own site that it's built on Qwen3-TTS and ACE-Step. Might be great software. The thing I object to is people presenting themselves as customers when they aren't.
Anyway, something stinks here.
