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.

  • early_riser@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    22 hours ago

    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.

    • (っ◕‿◕)っ@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      22 hours 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