Bilingual

Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro
18 days ago
- Realistic local text-to-speech (TTS) is now possible without compromising privacy.
- Kokoro, an 82M-parameter model, generates high-quality speech in multiple languages with around 50 voices, optimized for English.
- Setup is simple using a pre-made container image (Kokoro-FastAPI) that includes a web UI and an OpenAI-compatible API.
- Voice synthesis runs efficiently on CPU, with performance varying by processor (e.g., 1.5 seconds on AMD Ryzen 7 8745HS).
- Alternative solutions like Speaches offer TTS with STT (Speech-to-Text) capabilities, useful for combined applications.
Show HN: Orate – On-device neural text-to-speech queue for Mac
4 days ago
- Orate is a Mac app that reads selected text aloud using on-device text-to-speech
- Capture text from any app by selecting it and pressing L or right-clicking
- Collected items go into a listening queue with on-device rendering and natural pauses
- Playback controls include play, pause, scrub, speed adjustment, and voice changes via menu bar
- The app lives in the menu bar to avoid dock clutter and allow quick access
- Orate processes everything on-device with no account, cloud, or tracking for privacy
- Includes 14 built-in voices (American & British), an optional HD voice, and speed from 0.5x to 2x
- Offers a real queue with up next, tags, notes, and resume-where-you-left-off features
- One-time payment of $4.99 for a perpetual license with minor updates included, free 14-day trial
- Beneficial for users with dyslexia, low vision, ADHD, eye strain, or when hands-free listening is needed
- Works fully offline on Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 14 or later
Inflect-Micro-v2: complete voice in 9.36M parameters
4 hours ago
- Inflect-Micro-v2 is a fixed-voice English TTS model with under 10 million parameters, supporting CPU and CUDA inference with deterministic seeds and long-text handling.
- The model prioritizes quality (Micro) or footprint (Nano), with synthetically generated audio evaluated via human preference, UTMOS22, and multi-ASR intelligibility tests.
- Both Inflect variants (Micro and Nano) offer complete local text-to-waveform synthesis, including a 24 kHz waveform decoder, Python API, and ONNX runtime support.
- The release includes frozen evaluation protocols, competitive benchmarks against other compact TTS systems, and transparent reporting of metrics and limitations.
- The project is open-source under Apache-2.0, with a single fixed synthetic male voice, and does not support voice cloning or languages beyond English currently.

text-to-speech

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

Show HN: Orate – On-device neural text-to-speech queue for Mac

Inflect-Micro-v2: complete voice in 9.36M parameters