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.
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.
That looks amazing! Will check it out. Love Kokoro and love how good Apple Silicon is!
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.