so i yes, espeak exists and still sounds terrible even worse than picoTTS (last update 4 yrs ago?). so what else is there? i look at mimic3 and it says they are dead and one should go for piper here: https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3 the link to piper followed I get: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper "This repository was archived by the owner on Oct 6, 2025. It is now read-only. "

ok, so coqui? https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS no update in over 12 months..how bad can it be? https://coqui.ai/ ...great it is a page for gambling now.

so, what are you using? gTTS is not offline.

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[–] 21 points 10 months ago (1 child)

https://github.com/marytts/marytts

I've used MaryTTS semi-recently. It's older but works well enough for my cases. I have it running on a server (locally) and my endpoints make a call to it and playback the returned audio file.

On Android, I use SherpaTTS which has good voices, but I'm not aware of a desktop/Linux option. It mentions using voices from Coqui which you linked, so I would guess that would be the way to go for desktop.

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  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Piper just moved to https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl

    It's fine, and it's probably the best TTS you're going to run locally.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago*

    Happy to help.

    The docker setup is probably less maintenance than a straight install, but your usecase might need the bare install. there's also Home Assistant that can add Piper as an Addon (which is a docker container inside the HassOS docker container). Also the Hass install will let you add faster-Whisper and Openwakeword for a full voice assistant that autoconnects via the Wyoming protocol.

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  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Kokoro is your best bet right now. It works wonderfully even in a docker container with no GPU. There are others but I don’t have the list right now. Will throw another update on here when I do.

    The rhasspy guy was very invested in Coqui. He built a lot of his own stuff, for his home automation and such. But Coqui was superior, so he started spending time on that.

    Unfortunately, the coqui team (based out of Mozilla) was very distracted and didn’t ship a lot of stuff on time or at all. It doesn’t even have basic stuff like SSML support right now, if I recall correctly. So the rhasspy guy also lost steam.

    Of course, with the OpenAI model of audio generation, you’re expected to not use SSML at all and just use the black box API to get “good enough” results. That really sucks.

    Oh, I just remembered which other one I wanted to mention - someone has built an open source version of NotebookLLM, complete with multi voice support. But it requires GPU, I believe. Do what you will with that. I’ll add a link if I find it.

    I prefer kokoro because it’s really solid and works really well on CPU.

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  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago
    [–] 12 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Tbh I generally prefer that robot voices actually sound like robots. I don't want human sounding TTS since I don't like anthropomorphized machines. So I'd stay with something low tech.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    100%. It irks when software has messages in the first person. The human-like TTS are very uncanny valley to me.

    I needed voice over for a video recently and everyone is telling me to use AI, I tried dozens and they'll all just off. Ended up getting a friend to record it. I don't have a decent mic so my own recording sounded bad.

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  • [–] 12 points 10 months ago*

    for android: SherpaTTS and whisper for voice typing.

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  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago

    Check the README for piper. It moved to https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    What’s your workflow on your phone?

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 child)

    I have kaldi auto updated with my preferred voice when ever there is a new release via obtainium.

    I set kaldi as my tts engine, and I disabled the google TTS.

    Then anytime I use TTS on my phone it uses kaldi.

    Its been really great for my preferred eBook reader (Librera) so I can do chores and read at the same time.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago

    https://github.com/resemble-ai/chatterbox is pretty good, and has both TTS and voice cloning. Main disadvantage for me was that even if the cloning gives a consistent voice, the generated samples can get random accents.

    https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-TTS also seemed pretty promising, but I haven't had time to test it yet.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago

    Save that post for the next time when someone with too much time on their hands asks what project they should start/contribute to.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Try alltalk_tts v2. One of the features is you can provide an audio sample and the AI will imitate the voice. The overall quality is pretty good, if you choose a larger model and let it run.

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  • [+] 4 points 10 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] [S] 1 point 10 months ago (2 children)

    my use case is that n8n sshs into a remote machine with low specs and a connected speaker to read out information sent from n8n so i can do stuff like: pico2wave -l de-DE -w /tmp/warn.wav "Es ist {{ $json.Hour }} Uhr." && aplay /tmp/warn.wav And as you might have guess by now german language would be appreciated. I'm not going to run any additional docker containers for voice generation or invoke remote services. also the speaker is as dirt cheap as the rest of the setup so any output from espeak was basically killing my eardrums.

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  • [+] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] [S] 3 points 10 months ago

    @ikidd@lemmy.world pointed me to piperTTS and i ended up with a python virtual enviroment, pip install piper-tts and de_DE-thorsten-high.onnx+json to be able to run echo "{{ $json.state}}" | piper -m ./de_DE-thorsten-high.onnx -f voice.wav && aplay voice.wav

    and indeed that sounds much better than pico and espeak

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    It really depends on what you want to do with it. I run wyoming-piper as part of my Home Assistant deployment and its been rock solid. The Wyoming protocol is pretty well documented too, so you should be able to integrate with it pretty easily.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    I highly recommend Mlx-audio for anyone doing tts on Apple Silicon. It offers great performance, leverages kokoro-82M, and plays well with streaming frontends like Open webui. The one shot voice cloning feature is also pretty cool.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago

    Kokoro was the one I was going to mention. I played around with it a bit, was very impressed with the speed and quality. And then I realized I had been using it in CPU mode. GPU is incredible.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago*

    Faster Whisper could be a option, there is various GUI options available as well.

    https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper

    And if you are looking for something that you can "just install", I recommend balabolka. The voices are natural and you can use some of the windows built in voices to make it more natural.

    https://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm

    Make Azure natural TTS voices accessible to any SAPI 5-compatible application.

    https://github.com/gexgd0419/NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter

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  • [–] 0 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Not sure what you're asking here, but are you talking about the voice part, the TTS pat, or the interaction?

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