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.
sudobash1
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.
dmayle
A couple months back I wrote a chrome extension that does this on any webpage, with simultaneous highlighting of the sentence being read. Skips both the container launching step and the copy pasting website contents step. Might be useful to anyone trying to use kokoro ergonomically.
Love this model. I’m GPU poor and have had FOMO that I haven’t played with local models at all. About a month ago I setup Kokoro on my GTX1650 to do TTS for an article reader. A simple WebUI lets me paste a URL or a chunk of copy pasted text. Python cleans it up and sends to Kokoro for TTS and it’s then served via RSS for Apple Podcasts. Then for my morning drive I’ll catch up on articles or blog posts I’ve gathered.
At some point I’d like to play with separate voices and see if I could build something like NotebookLM for kind of like a radio morning show of news items I’ve gathered.
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 input.
montenegrohugo
TTS has come incredible long way, there are so many options. There is Kokoro of course, then there is Pocket TTS which is also a tiny 100M model that allows voice cloning. There is also Chatterbox Turbo, which is bit bigger but also allows for more emotional control of the voice. And then finally there is the Fish Audio S2, which is even bigger but allows even larger and essentially unbounded finegrained control of tone and emotion. And all of these can easily run on your Macbook.
armcat
I spent a day fiddling with AI and dropping the expensive layers in kokoro, on phones, on CPU, on MNN, it runs 3x faster.
I'm using Kokoro for a fun little side-project browser-based game I'm working on. It's legitimately super good for being only 85mb (for the wasm version) or 300mb (for the webgpu version).
comments (10)
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.
sudobash1
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.
dmayle
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/local-reader-ai-on-...
SambhavGupta
At some point I’d like to play with separate voices and see if I could build something like NotebookLM for kind of like a radio morning show of news items I’ve gathered.
bronco21016
Kokoro is a really good model, considered it’s released 1.5 years ago. It’s punching above its weight https://5uck1ess.github.io/tts-bench/scores.html
karimf
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 input.
montenegrohugo
armcat
Quality is very close.
Will vary in your setup, but here is my script: https://github.com/DavidVentura/translator-rs/blob/master/sc...
deivid
dvt
the onnx version of pocket-tts does perform better. https://huggingface.co/KevinAHM/pocket-tts-onnx
teravor