from Hacker News

Edge TTS

by smy20011 on 1/23/25, 3:17 AM with 65 comments

• by BrunoJo on 1/23/25, 6:07 AM

  I wouldn't use Edge TTS for commercial projects since it's using an internal Microsoft API that was reverse engineered.

  If you are looking for a commercial API, I just launched a TTS API powered by the the best performing open source model Kokoro: https://www.lemonfox.ai/text-to-speech-api. The API is compatible with OpenAI and ElevenLabs and up to 25x cheaper.

• by modeless on 1/23/25, 4:20 AM

  Why would you pirate a TTS service when there are so many great options for local open source TTS now? Models like Fish and Kokoro and StyleTTSv2 are great and very fast.

  Click the leaderboard tab here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/TTS-AGI/TTS-Arena

• by chopete3 on 1/23/25, 4:09 AM

  Its not running on the edge. A hack to use MS online tts.

  >> edge-tts is a Python module that allows you to use Microsoft Edge's online text-to-speech service from within your Python code or using the provided edge-tts or edge-playback command.

• by hexage1814 on 1/23/25, 6:50 AM

  Have been using this for some time. It is pretty good. But not as good as ElevenLabs though.

  Also, ironically enough, ElevenLabs lunched a readerapp for iOS and Android, which allows you to text to speech for "free" in some limited voice selections, but the app is not available for PC or as browser extension. So like "we give you unlimited tts but only if you use your smartphone"

• by dcre on 1/23/25, 5:23 AM

  Not sure if the CLI does this directly, but here's a command that takes text either as an arg or through stdin.

      function tts() {
        if [ -p /dev/stdin ]; then
          edge-playback --file -
        else
          edge-playback --text "$*"
        fi
      }

• by slyn on 1/23/25, 5:04 AM

  I like to use Edge on occasion when I need to read something dry but necessary because I find following along with the TTS it’s auto-highlight of text helps me stay focused and retain better as well.

  Is there any equivalent program for ebooks? If not can someone build one? The dream would be to plop in an arbitrary document (pdf, docs, tex, epub, and so on) and have it read to me by a reasonable TTS at a speed of my choosing and have words / lines highlighted as the TTS goes along. Bonus points if you can regularly identify and skip things that are not necessarily relevant like page numbers, headers, footnote markers, and so on, which is something that Edge TTS within Edge struggles with when reading PDFs.

• by westcort on 1/26/25, 3:34 AM

  Can anyone just make a simple program that will use one of these better TTS engines. I just want a a dialog box, a big button that says "Generate text" and you paste in the content you want converted to receive an MP3 file. Fully compiled binaries for Linux, Windows, and Mac, please?

• by slig on 1/23/25, 3:13 PM

  I'd like the equivalent of "say" from macOS on my W11/WSL2 machine, is there anything entirely offline that just works?

• by VMtest on 1/23/25, 12:55 PM

  Thanks for sharing this, I learnt that Edge on mobile has TTS as well but I have never used it on desktop or mobile

  Now that I try it on desktop, it's really good! I might try to use the python script in the future

• by gigel82 on 1/23/25, 6:19 AM

  This is dubious, I'm surprised MS hasn't locked down those APIs yet.

  I'm curious, would this be the legal equivalent of "cracked" software in terms of piracy?

• by caseyy on 1/23/25, 4:29 AM

  So is this entirely offline? If so, it could have quite many useful applications, if not for copyleft of course.

• by RobinHirst11 on 1/23/25, 9:10 AM

  used this for ages. i have my raspberry pi setup with Cloudflare tunnels to rout to my domain... extremely useful :)

• by yapyap on 1/23/25, 5:07 PM

  Do what now to TTS