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Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

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Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#353

Post by anthk »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #98
defanor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Festival's English model, festvox-kallpc16k, is about 6 MB, and it is a large model; festvox-kallpc8k is about 3.5 MB. eSpeak NG's data files take about 12 MB (multi-lingual). I guess this one may generate more natural-sounding speech, but older or lower-end computers were capable of decent speech synthesis previously as well.

Custom voices could be added, but the speed was more important to some users. $ ls -lh /usr/bin/flite Listed as 27K last I checked. I recall some Blind users were able to decode Gordon 8-bit dialogue at speeds most people found incomprehensible. =3

I'm not blind but spoken English it's far more difficult to grasp than written one (I'm a non-native speaker), and Flite runs on n270 netbooks at crazy speeds with really good enough voices.

Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#355

Post by Jotalea »

don-bright wrote: post #335
peanut_merchant wrote: post #269

I ran some quick benchmarks. Ubuntu 24, Razer Blade 16, Intel Core i9-14900HX Performance Results: Initial Latency: ~315ms for short text Audio Generation Speed (seconds of audio per second of processing): - Short text (12 chars): 3.35x realtime - Medium text (100 chars): 5.34x realtime - Long text (225 chars): 5.46x realtime - Very Long text (306 chars): 5.50x realtime Findings: - Model loads in ~710ms - Generates a…

on my Intel(R) Celeron(R) N4020 CPU @ 1.10GHz it takes 6 seconds to import/load and text generation is roughly 1x realtime on various lengths of text.

thanks for testing on the same hardware as mine, before me.

Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#359

Post by ethan_smith »

MutedEstate45 wrote: post #52

The 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…

This opens up voice interfaces for medical devices, offline language learning tools, and accessibility gadgets for the visually impaired - all markets where cloud dependency and proprietary licenses were showstoppers.

Re: Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model

#360

Post by kamranjon »

wkat4242 wrote: post #339
kamranjon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best open one I've found so far is Dia - https://github.com/nari-labs/dia - it has some limitations, but i think it's really impressive and I can run it on my laptop.

Thanks I'll try! I like how it sounds, the quality is really good. But the limitations are really severe (shorter than 5 seconds is not ok, > 30 seconds is not ok, it will play a random voice every time, those make it pretty much unusable for an assistant to be honest). But it might be worth setting it up and seeing if it improves over time.

You can get consistent voice by providing a sample - and yea the timing stuff is what you have to work around - have to basically chunk your inputs.
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