Who is going to hack together a mac widget that allows us to select text anywhere, press a shortcut key and finally get a non robotic voice outputted in a reasonable amount of time? I am aware of the Option + Esc shortcut on osx for the onboard TTS but wow is it hard to listen to in 2026.
Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro
41–50 of 107 posts
Re: Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro
#42Who is going to hack together a mac widget that allows us to select text anywhere, press a shortcut key and finally get a non robotic voice outputted in a reasonable amount of time? I am aware of the Option + Esc shortcut on osx for the onboard TTS but wow is it hard to listen to in 2026.
Re: Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro
#43I 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 littl…
Re: Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro
#44I 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 littl…
Re: Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro
#45If you're interested in an ONNX version and a permissively licensed TTS Tokenizer, I built a pipeline for that a while back: https://huggingface.co/NeuML/kokoro-base-onnx
Re: Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro
#46Re: Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro
#47I do wish there were better support for SSML, as well as deeper documentation of how to influence inflection in-line, but the default does well with standard emphasis (e.g. putting asterisks around text elements). Both asks are getting outside the zone of reasonable asks for this sort of distribution, though, and I remain incredibly grateful for the quality of what hexgrad and nazdridoy have put out in the world.
Re: Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro
#48Who is going to hack together a mac widget that allows us to select text anywhere, press a shortcut key and finally get a non robotic voice outputted in a reasonable amount of time? I am aware of the Option + Esc shortcut on osx for the onboard TTS but wow is it hard to listen to in 2026.
In System Settings, if you go to Accessibility and click "Read & Speak" in the "Vision" section, you can select a different voice using the "System voice" section. Click the "(i)" to preview your various options and even download more. Some, like "Allison (Enhanced)," sound leagues better than the default voice.
Re: Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro
#49Re: Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro
#50Super cool!! I've been using my own solution since January. I'm on Linux, and can't use Aqua, Whipsrflow etc... So i made my own. Recently cleaned it up and made it install friendly. If anyone is interested, you can check it out here: https://github.com/Hugo0/voiceio It's self-improving over time, runs on your local machine, and is generally decent software. 60% of my interaction with my PC nowadays is pure voice inp…