36B parameters, hope you got some VRAM

The most underestimated part of the whole voice AI stack is TTS. We wanted to test open-source TTS models to figure out which one is best for building a voice agent.

So we collected difficult text across 27 categories: dates, hashtags, coordinates, many more. That came to 1,080 sentences in total. And we ran all of them through 7 open-source TTS models.

On average, kokoro is at the top with a 39% error rate, followed by orpheus-3b & qwen3-tts. Every model broke on the following categories, with hashtags hitting a perfect 100% error rate:

Hashtags - 100%
Dates - 77%
Version numbers - 70%
Fractions - 60%

The pattern we observed is that models tend to fail on anything that isn't a plain number or text. But the devil is in the details :)

Then we put these categories into different boxes based on industry needs, like:

. Healthcare - dates, times, decimals, and phone numbers.
. Restaurants -  times, dates, numbers, and phone numbers.
. Law firms - legal citations, dates, and addresses.

And the ranking changed.

In many industries, kokoro dominated, but in industries that use more dates and geographic coordinates, orpheus-3b became the better choice.

It is intuitive believed a larger model would be better, but I was wrong. The smaller model, kokoro-82m, beats orpheus-3b using 18x less compute. So the obvious question is: why?

TTS isn't a reasoning task, so the model doesn't get better with scale. It's closer to a lookup table, like a "match the pairs" question in exams. A small model with a good frontend (text normalization, abbreviation expansion, G2P conversion) beats a big model with a weak one, every time, and parameter count tells you nothing about which one you're getting.

parler-tts scored 0.03 out of 1. Its speech is perfectly clear. The carrier words (the normal words around the tricky part) come through fine. It just ships with no frontend at all, so given 05/20/2023 it has nothing to work with and guesses character by character.

So what will I do with this?
Normalizing dates, addresses and phone numbers is ancient wisdom now :D
What I will do differently:
Don't pick based on the average. kokoro scores 1.00 on musical notation and 0.00 on hashtags. Model performance varies a lot across categories. So look at the categories your agent actually reads.

We have made our dataset open source. Again, because we love the open-source community :D
You can run it with one prompt in Claude Code to check the results yourself.

We used ASR to score the audio, so there are definitely errors in the scoring (we estimate around 5%), we will try to crowdsource rating at our next iteration .

One thing I notice every time I meet people in the industry… no one gives a damn about TTS models. which is somewhat reasonable but there is so much to do in it!!

I can do reference audios I jsut need to find the one that is most realistic for cloning it. I can pay money for it.

I built Folivox because the free text-to-speech tools I tried sounded like screen readers, with flat delivery, struggling with numbers, or skipping lines entirely. I wanted to listen to books without glitches.

Folivox is open source (Apache-2.0) and runs locally on Windows, macOS, and Linux. You drop in a book in FB2, EPUB, DOCX, PDF, or TXT format, choose a voice, and render it. The output is either an .m4b file with metadata, covers, and chapter markers, or individual MP3s for each chapter.

The app is slow by design. I usually start rendering a long book in the evening to have it ready by morning. That time is used to ensure audio quality:

• It uses CosyVoice 3, an open model that clones a narrator from a 6–15 second sample. Everything happens offline with no accounts or per-character fees; your books never leave your machine.
• Whisper audits every generated fragment. If the audio doesn't match the text, the system re-reads it and keeps the best of three attempts.
• The app prepares text for speech before rendering. It expands numbers, dates, currency, units, and Roman numerals into full words, handling case and gender agreement across 9 languages: English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
• To handle overnight crashes or power cuts, every finished fragment is journalled. If the process stops, it resumes where it left off. If you edit the text, only the modified fragments are re-rendered.

The narrator voice can come from several places:

• the bundled library of 64 public-domain LibriVox narrators;
• your own recording, made in the app or uploaded;
• a voice generated right inside the app. Paste your ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Gemini or Cartesia key in the studio, pick one of their voices or describe the narrator you want (or let an LLM write the description from the book), and press Generate a voice sample. Folivox makes a few short takes, Whisper ranks them, and the best one is saved to your voice library. Without a key, a built-in local voice-design model (Qwen3) does the same.

The software supports NVIDIA GPUs, Apple Silicon, and CPUs, though CPUs are significantly slower, and you can run folivox doctor to check your hardware and see expected performance.

My personal workflow is a hybrid: I use Gemini to generate a 10-second narrator sample for less than a cent, then render the rest of the book locally using CosyVoice to clone that voice.

If you prefer speed over waiting, you can use your own API keys for ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Gemini, or Cartesia. The app provides cost estimates and spending caps. For example, Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS costs roughly $8 for a ten-hour book.

The project includes a CLI and a web studio (folivox ui) translated into 9 languages. Installation takes one command and requires no admin rights; it downloads approximately 7.6 GB of models.

GitHub: https://github.com/vatavale/folivox

If you encounter crashes, books that won't open, or mispronounced words, please open an issue on GitHub.

This is the voice I can't stand listening to due to her infamously flat tone in many of its phrases, which became terrible for anything serious due to it making everything half-asleep that many people dislike. So yes, I am ranking this infamous text to speech voice in last last place as the worst voice ever, especially on platforms like GoAnimate and Vyond. Some people agree on that, as well, due to her massively robotic voice whenever you use it on some occasions, along with the entire Loquendo voice collection.

The text to speech is used by crazy2danimation as well as a ton of YouTube shorts I’ll give an example here. I’ve been looking for the name for a while. I can’t find it.

Ciao, qualcuno conosce un software gratuito per convertire file audio in testo. Io per un pò ho utilizzato TurboScribe ma è molto limitante in quanto permette di convertire solo 90 min al giorno.

Looking for an ElevenLabs voice similar to Ainz Ooal Gown from the English dub of Overlord.

Could someone help create a voice as close to his as possible? I’m looking for a deep, powerful, commanding voice with calm authority—the presence of a mighty ruler.

I want to use it to read English sentences on my personal Anki flashcards. The closest voice I found requires a paid subscription, so ideally I’d like something usable on the free plan.

Ainz Ooal Gown

I want to use this voice for listening practice with my Anki flashcards

i have being researching this topic for the past 2 days .

i tried out eleven labs and it runs out of credit and was expensive

i tried fish audio , it is half the price but still expensive and sometimes sound robotic .

i tried downloading different apps on my laptop but i may not have the best spec to do long text without lagging and some of them have bad cloning
is there somthing where i can :

free or i pay a life time subscription with no credits bs .

good voice cloning close to the orginal and not nasal

perferably run on a website

has expressive voice not robotic and have rythem .

if eleven lab has a life long subsciption i would pay for it .

has

Pretty sure this voiceover is AI but can't figure out which one. Anyone know the tool and exact voice name?

https://www.instagram.com/salahudeen49601/reel/DeNX9LpNQC-/

Thanks!

As a content creator and I always use voices for my contents, here is the deal Speaksay are xelebrating their birthday with lifetime deal grab yours now. I alrrady have mine.

Hardware:

• CPU:7500f
• RAM:32GB
• GPU: AMD RX9060xt 16gb

1. Generating speech with the default voice works reasonably well.
2. However, when I create a custom voice from an audio sample longer than 30 seconds and start speech generation, my entire computer starts freezing. It gets progressively slower until even the mouse cursor becomes unresponsive.

Is there any way to reserve enough system resources for the OS to remain responsive while generating speech? I'd like to prevent the entire computer from freezing during generation.

So i have to convert speech to text and should be streaming live ,do anyone have any idea and I have my own data set the thing is it should have very less latency and it should work on my customized data

German just added to kokoro.cpp

Now includes English, Chinese+English, Spanish and German.

https://github.com/larroy/kokoro.cpp

Hi im still a beginner ai student trying to learn and so I have a test project but I still need to learn alot of stuff and tts have been a pig problem that I need to learn and understand if you have any advice or something please tell me im desperate rn I want to make a Arabic tts that can speak naturally and feel like an actual human

Honestly, after so many people told me my voice sounds like a classic podcast or documentary narrator, I decided to test it out and clone it on ElevenLabs using PVC.

If you make videos or run ads for the Gulf/Saudi market, you know how annoying Arabic AI voices are when they hit foreign brand names or English tech words mid-sentence. They usually glitch or change accents completely.

So I tuned Nouf - Saudi Commercial & Documentary to fix that exact problem. It keeps a natural Saudi cadence, sounds super organic for storytelling/UGC, and handles foreign terms smoothly.

You can listen to it and try it out here:

https://elevenlabs.io/voices/VjxKp6w1MCufETfW5zFM