this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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so i yes, espeak exists and still sounds terrible even worse than picoTTS (last update 4 yrs ago?). so what else is there? i look at mimic3 and it says they are dead and one should go for piper here: https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3 the link to piper followed I get: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper "This repository was archived by the owner on Oct 6, 2025. It is now read-only. "

ok, so coqui? https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS no update in over 12 months..how bad can it be? https://coqui.ai/ ...great it is a page for gambling now.

so, what are you using? gTTS is not offline.

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[โ€“] early_riser@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm fairly confident espeak is all you're going to get that's FOSS, local, and with any non English support. Yes every espeak language sounds like a Brittish guy badly pronouncing that language, and this includes the American English voice as well.

[โ€“] KarlLimbo@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

@ikidd@lemmy.world pointed me to piperTTS and i ended up with a python virtual enviroment, pip install piper-tts and de_DE-thorsten-high.onnx+json to be able to run echo "{{ $json.state}}" | piper -m ./de_DE-thorsten-high.onnx -f voice.wav && aplay voice.wav

and indeed that sounds much better than pico and espeak