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.
None of this may be relevant, but I’m curious what your use case is. I use TTS very extensively to consume media and have my preferences. None of them are open source, but as far as I know all operate locally, though they’re baked into other programs like screen readers and ebook readers.
I prefer older more robotic voices because they remain intelligible at high speed. Eloquence is a favorite, as are the older Apple voices like Fred and Ralph. I think it has gone by other names but TruVoice (spacing and capitalization may vary) is also up there. It was semi popular during the surreal meme era. Another memetic synth that’s a little before my time but I quite enjoy is DECTalk (AKA the Moonbase Alpha voice). I believe Vocalizer was responsible for the OG Siri voice Samantha and that one’s a more human voice that’s still serviceable at high speeds.
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.wavAnd 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.I’m fairly confident espeak is all you’re going to get that’s FOSS, local, and with any non English support. Yes every espeak language sounds like a Brittish guy badly pronouncing that language, and this includes the American English voice as well.
@[email protected] 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.wavand indeed that sounds much better than pico and espeak