Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro

I have used Kokoro fairly extensively for an accessibility product. I have loved working with it (especially because I don't have an NVidia GPU like many TTS of similar quality require).

I particularly appreciate the fact that it lets you manually add IPA pronunciation guides. There have been some cases where an important word is a homograph and Kokoro assumed the wrong pronunciation.

The place where it falls a little short is in saying just a single word or two. Try having it say simply "six" and it almost always says something like "ah-six-ah". I found a way around that though. If you give it a longer sentence to say (eg "The word is: six") it will say it fine. The trick is that the Kokoro API gives you the timestamp of each word in the sentence. So you can have a Python script crop out just the word you care about. The intonation is a little flat this way, but is very reliable.

I asked about this on the discord, and was told that it is a limitation of the small parameter size. But in fairness to Kokoro, even eleven-labs' voices suffer from this occasionally.

Fun... This is something I actually care about...

I used to keep a version of whisperx around, because I think it's important to have not just transcription, but also timing and speaker identification (e.g. for subtitles)... It depends on pyannote, though, which has some wierd licensing (and is tougher to script the installs because of it), so I wanted to look at something that both had better transcription, and supported diarization (the speaker and timing). I decided on parakeet for the transcription with softformer (the diarization), but most of the available engines for it don't include softformer.

I coded up an OpenAI compatible server for parakeet-rs ( https://github.com/altunenes/parakeet-rs ) (which does support softformer) and I've been using it with OpenWhispr (a desktop app for transcription that handles all sorts of neat thing).

I'm doing CPU-only transcription (because I use my GPUs for other stuff and haven't gotten around to adding in the GPU-path), but it's incredibly empowering to be able to have local transcriptions at will.

Cool I actually got it ported to iPhone’s ANE finally yesterday! So we can get both rt natural local TTS and 4x less battery drainage and thermals

Love Kokoro tts. I wrote https://github.com/Jud/kokoro-coreml to try pushing the limits a bit on speed & size. Such great quality at a given size. As others have mentioned short utterances are problematic, but solvable.

I'm using Kokoro for a fun little side-project browser-based game I'm working on. It's legitimately super good for being only 85mb (for the wasm version) or 300mb (for the webgpu version).

Anyone know which local TTS is best, close to Eleven Labs quality?

kokoro is decent but pocket-tts is much better especially when you rip a good voice. https://github.com/kyutai-labs/pocket-tts

the onnx version of pocket-tts does perform better. https://huggingface.co/KevinAHM/pocket-tts-onnx

I'm using exactly this TTS engine for my intercom door system I built. The quality of the TTS is very good.

Yeah, we need to keep up with how quickly AI types back to us, typing on the keyboards is no longer quick enough, gotta dictate everything now.

Any good debian-ish distros that integrate TTS and STT in a usable shell?

kokoro is surprisingly great at nuance but it's tough to improve that last ~2% or so. kokoro + rvc is really great too; i use that for ELEMENT47, the LLM-centric comedy podcast i do that i wish more people would listen to. (e47.net , feel free to subscribe!)

kokoro is very nice, but I am disappointed that this wasn't an announcement of a new kokoro version.

> Apple M2 Pro: 4.5 seconds

> AMD Ryzen 7 8745HS: 1.5 seconds

These two can probably do it much faster on their iGPUs.