from Hacker News

Free Local Text to Speech?

by daly on 8/29/24, 10:40 PM with 4 comments

It seems very odd that so many complex LLM features like image generation are available and run locally but I can't find one that will do text-to-speech.

I need local because the end-user does not have regular web connectivity.

The idea case is reading PDFs during plane flights.

Even Dragon Systems (anyone remember "Barnburner One..."?) now is cloud connected.

  • by ssmaameri on 9/6/24, 1:44 PM

    OpenAI Whisper model is open source and can be run locally. There is a "light" version also to help it run on lower resourced machines, e.g local machine perhaps

  • by solardev on 8/30/24, 3:19 AM

    Windows and Mac systems have this built in now, with a variety of voices. It's usually grouped under accessibility settings. Would that work?

  • by dv35z on 8/30/24, 2:04 AM

    Check out Piper TTS: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper

    Note: I tried to run it on MacOS and had an issue with Python compatibility - ended up running it in a Docker container, got it working fine. If you experience the same issue, let me know - happy to share the code.

  • by daly on 8/30/24, 2:18 AM

    I'll check that out. Thanks.