Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro

Fun... This is something I actually care about...

I used to keep a version of whisperx around, because I think it's important to have not just transcription, but also timing and speaker identification (e.g. for subtitles)... It depends on pyannote, though, which has some wierd licensing (and is tougher to script the installs because of it), so I wanted to look at something that both had better transcription, and supported diarization (the speaker and timing). I decided on parakeet for the transcription with softformer (the diarization), but most of the available engines for it don't include softformer.

I coded up an OpenAI compatible server for parakeet-rs ( https://github.com/altunenes/parakeet-rs ) (which does support softformer) and I've been using it with OpenWhispr (a desktop app for transcription that handles all sorts of neat thing).

I'm doing CPU-only transcription (because I use my GPUs for other stuff and haven't gotten around to adding in the GPU-path), but it's incredibly empowering to be able to have local transcriptions at will.

This is the opposite way

You're right... I read the title too quickly... I'll have to look at Senko vs Softformer later...

Yep, and Kokoro-FastAPI (which he already uses) makes it super easy with start-gpu_mac.sh

I have used Kokoro fairly extensively for an accessibility product. I have loved working with it (especially because I don't have an NVidia GPU like many TTS of similar quality require).

I particularly appreciate the fact that it lets you manually add IPA pronunciation guides. There have been some cases where an important word is a homograph and Kokoro assumed the wrong pronunciation.

The place where it falls a little short is in saying just a single word or two. Try having it say simply "six" and it almost always says something like "ah-six-ah". I found a way around that though. If you give it a longer sentence to say (eg "The word is: six") it will say it fine. The trick is that the Kokoro API gives you the timestamp of each word in the sentence. So you can have a Python script crop out just the word you care about. The intonation is a little flat this way, but is very reliable.

I asked about this on the discord, and was told that it is a limitation of the small parameter size. But in fairness to Kokoro, even eleven-labs' voices suffer from this occasionally.