I’m new to TTS models but is this something I can plug into my own engine like with LLMs, or does it require the Python stack it ships with?
Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
201–210 of 383 posts
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#202A localized version of this, and I could finally build my tiny Amazon Echo replacement. I would love to see all speech synthesis performed on a local device.
I'm doing this now with Home Assistant voice. All the TTS, STT, and LLMs involved run locally on my network. It's absurdly superior to every other voice assistant product. (Would be nice if it was just a pure multi-modal model though)
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#203Reddit post with generated audio sample: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mhyzp7/kitten_...
Impressive technical achievement, but in terms of whether I'd use it: oof, that male voice is like one of these fake-excited newsreaders. Like they're always at the edge of their breath. The female one is better but still someone reading out an advertisement for a product they were told they must act extra excited for. I assume this is what the majority of training data was like and not an intentional setting for the demo. Unsure whether I could get used to that
I use TTS on my phone regularly and recently also tried this new project on F-Droid called SherpaTTS, which grabs some models from Huggingface. They're super heavy (the phone suspends other apps to disk while this runs) and sound good, but in the first news article there were already one or two mispronunciations because it's guessing how to say uncommon or new words and it's not based on logical rules anymore to turn text into speech
Google and Samsung have each a TTS engine pre-installed on my device and those sound and work fine. A tad monotonous but it seems to always pronounce things the same way so you can always work out what the text said
Espeak (or -ng) is the absolute worst, but after 30 seconds of listening closely you get used to it and can understand everything fine. I don't know if it's the best open source option (probably there are others that I should be trying) but it's at least the most reliable where you'll always get what is happening and you can install it on any device without licensing issues
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#204Microsoft's and some of Google's TTS models make the simplest mistakes. For instance, they sometimes read "i.e." as "for example." This is a problem if you have low vision and use TTS for, say, proofreading your emails. Why does it happen? I'm genuinely curious.
They're often trained from video subtitles, and humans writing subtitles make that kind of mistake too.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are working to fix that. Thanks
Just point people to uv/uvx.
The project is like 80% there by having a pyproject file that should work with uv and poetry. The just aren't any package versions specified and the python version is incredibly lax, and no lock file is provided.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I tried to replicate their demo text but it doesn't sound as good for some reason. If anyone else wants to try: > Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. Our smallest model is less than 25 megabytes.
Is the demo using the not smallest model?
Perhaps, but the 25MB model is the only thing they've released
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#207Reddit post with generated audio sample: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mhyzp7/kitten_...
Sounds slow and like something from an anine
The only real questions are which Chinese gacha game they ripped data from and whether they used Claude Code or Gemini CLI for Python code. I bet one can get a formant match from output this much overfit to whatever data. This isn't going to stay up for long.
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#208Earlier 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.
Okay, what's stopping you from feeding the code into an LLM and re-write it and make it yours? You can even add extra steps like make it analyze the code block by block then supervise it as it is rewriting it. Bam. AI age IP freedom. Morals may stop you but other than that? IMHO all open source code is public domain code if anyone is willing to spend some AI tokens.
Tell me you haven't used LLMs on large, non-trivial codebases without telling me... :)
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#209BEAT THIS! Commodore C64 has the same feature called SAM - speaker synthesizer, speaks English and Polish.
48 kB of RAM
BEAT THIS!
Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model
#210Good TTS feels like it is something that should be natively built into every consumer device. So the user can decide if they want to read or listen to the text at hand. I'm surprised that phone manufacturers do not include good TTS models in their browser APIs for example. So that websites can build good audio interfaces. I for one would love to build a text editor that the user can use completely via audio. Text inp…
On Mac OS you can "speak" a text in almost every app, using built in voice (like the Siri voice or some older voices). All offline, and even from the terminal with "say".
I tried it a few months ago to narrate an epub in Apple Books and it was very broken in a weird way. It starts out decent but after a few pages, it starts slurring, skipping words, trailing off not finishing sentences and then goes silent.
(I've just tried it again without seeing that issue within a few pages)
> Siri voice or some older voices
You can choose "Enhanced" and "Premium" versions of voices which are larger and sound nice and modern to me. The "Serena Premium" voice I was using is over 200Mb and far better that this Show HN. It's very natural but kind of ruined by diabolical pronunciation of anything slightly non-standard which sadly seems to cover everything I read e.g. people/place names, technical/scientific terms or any neologisms in scifi/fantasy.
It's so wildly incomprehensible for e.g. Tibetan names in a mountaineering book, that you have to check the text. If the word being butchered is frequently repeated e.g. main character’s name, then it's just too painful to use.