Web version: https://clowerweb.github.io/kitten-tts-web-demo/ It sounds ok, but impressive for the size.
It feels like it doesn't handle punctuation well. I don't hear sentence boundaries and commas. It sounds like continuous stream of words.
Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
161–170 of 383 posts
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#162The headline feature isn’t the 25 MB footprint alone. It’s that KittenTTS is Apache-2.0. That combo means you can embed a fully offline voice in Pi Zero-class hardware or even battery-powered toys without worrying about GPUs, cloud calls, or restrictive licenses. In one stroke it turns voice everywhere from a hardware/licensing problem into a packaging problem. Quality tweaks can come later; unlocking that deployment…
> It’s that KittenTTS is Apache-2.0 Have you seen the code[1] in the repo? It uses phonemizer[2] which is GPL-3.0 licensed. In its current state, it's effectively GPL licensed. [1]: https://github.com/KittenML/KittenTTS/blob/main/kittentts/on... [2]: https://github.com/bootphon/phonemizer Edit: It looks like I replied to an LLM generated comment.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds slow and like something from an anine
Speech speed is always a tunable parameter and not something intrinsic to the model. The comparison to make is expressiveness and correct intonation for long sentences vs something like espeak. It actually sounds amazing for the size. The closest thing is probably KokoroTTS at 82M params and ~300MB.
I think he meant overacting typical for English dubs.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#164The samples featured elsewhere seem to be from a larger model?
After testing this locally, it still sounds quite mechanical, and fails catastrophically for simple phrases with numbers ("easy as 1-2-3"). If the 80M model can improve on this and keep the expressiveness seen in the reddit post, that looks promising.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are still people who use machine wide python installs instead of environments? Python dependency hell was already bad years ago, but today it's completely impractical to do it this way. Even on raspberries.
Debian pretty much "solved" this by making pip refuse to install packages if you are not in an venv.
Ditto OpenSUSE, at least on Tumbleweed
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#166Not bad for the size (with my very limited knowledge of this field) !
In a couple tests, the "Male 2" voice sounds reasonable, but I've found it has problem with some groups of words, specially when played with little context. I think it's small sentences.
For example, if you try to do just "Hey gang!", it will sound something like "Chay yang". But if you add an additional sentence after that, it will sound a bit different (but still weird).
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#167Web version: https://clowerweb.github.io/kitten-tts-web-demo/ It sounds ok, but impressive for the size.
Does anybody find it funny that sci-fi movies have to heavily distort "robot voices" to make them sound "convincingly robotic"? A robotic, explicitly non-natural voice would be perfectly acceptable, and even desirable, in many situations. I don't expect a smart toaster to talk like a BBC host; it'd be enough is the speech if easy to recognize.
If you're on a Mac, you can type "say [thing to say]" into your terminal.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#168Question for the experts here; What would be a SOTA TTS that can run on an average laptop (32GB RAM, 4GB VRAM). I just want to attach a TTS to my SLM output, and get the highest possible voice quality/ human resembleness.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s that KittenTTS is Apache-2.0 Have you seen the code[1] in the repo? It uses phonemizer[2] which is GPL-3.0 licensed. In its current state, it's effectively GPL licensed. [1]: https://github.com/KittenML/KittenTTS/blob/main/kittentts/on... [2]: https://github.com/bootphon/phonemizer Edit: It looks like I replied to an LLM generated comment.
https://github.com/KittenML/KittenTTS/issues/17
> IANAL, but AFAICS this leaves 2 options, switching the license or removing that dependency.
There is a third option: asking the project for an exception.
Though that is unlikely to be granted¹ leaving you back with just the other two options.
And of course a forth choice: just ignore the license. This is the option taken by companies like Onyx, whose products I might otherwise be interested in…
----
[1] Those of us who pick GPL3 or AGPL generally do so to keep things definite and an exception would muddy the waters, also it might not even be possible if the project has many maintainers as relicensing would require agreement from all who have provided code that is in the current release. Furthermore, if it has inherited the license from one of its dependencies, an exception is even less practical.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#170System Requirements Works literally everywhere Haha, on one of my machines my python version is too old, and the package/dependencies don't want to install. On another machie the python version is too new, and the package/dependencies don't want to install.
Install it with uvx that should solve the python issues.
https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/tools/
uv installation: