What is Kokoro-TTS
Kokoro-TTS is a lightweighttext-to-speech(TTS) model developed by hexgrad, with 82 million parameters. Based on a hybrid architecture of StyleTTS 2 and ISTFTNet, it adopts a pure decoder design without using diffusion models, reducing computational complexity, and possesses excellent speech synthesis quality and real-time processing capability. Kokoro-TTS supports multiple voice styles, including special styles such as whispering, and can generate natural intonation and prosody. It is cross-platform compatible and has low resource usage. The training data consists entirely of licensed/non-copyrighted audio data and IPA phoneme labels, including public domain audio, audio under Apache, MIT, and other licenses, as well as synthetic audio generated by closed-source TTS models from large providers. Kokoro-TTS currently supports American English and British English, and provides 10 different voice packs covering different genders and voice characteristics.
Main Features of Kokoro-TTS
- Natural intonation and prosody: It can generate natural and fluent intonation and prosody, making the synthesized speech sound closer to real human speech, avoiding the stiff and mechanical speech effects that traditional TTS models may produce.
- Multiple voice styles: It supports multiple voice styles, including special styles such as whispering. Users can choose appropriate voice styles according to different application scenarios and needs, enriching the diversity of voice expression.
- Language support: It currently supports American English and British English, providing convenient text-to-speech services for English users and meeting the needs of users in different regions for English speech synthesis.
- Voice pack selection: It provides 10 different voice packs covering different genders and voice characteristics, such as Adam, Michael (American English), Bella, Sarah (British English), etc. Users can choose different voice packs according to their preferences to achieve personalized speech synthesis.
- Real-time processing: It has real-time processing capability and can quickly convert text to speech with extremely low latency, making it suitable for application scenarios with high real-time requirements, such as online live streaming and real-time translation.
- Optimized architecture: It adopts a hybrid architecture based on StyleTTS 2 and ISTFTNet, as well as a pure decoder design, without using diffusion models, reducing computational complexity, improving synthesis speed, and at the same time using fewer resources, allowing efficient operation on resource-constrained devices.
- Seamless API integration: It provides seamless API integration, making it convenient for developers to embed it into various applications, and supports text-to-speech functionality on desktop applications, Web services, and mobile platforms.
- Local processing: It supports local processing without uploading data to the cloud. The data is fully controlled by the user, effectively protecting user privacy and data security.
How to use Kokoro-TTS
- Online experience: Visit Hugging Face Spaces'online demo, and directly enter text to experience the speech synthesis effect.
- Local deployment
- Install dependencies to ensure the system meets hardware and software requirements, especially NVIDIA GPU and CUDA drivers. Install Docker Desktop and Git.
- Build the model and load the default voice pack.
- Call the generation function to return 24kHz audio and the phonemes used.
- Display the 24kHz audio and print the output phonemes.
Application Scenarios of Kokoro-TTS
- Voice narration: Online education platforms can use Kokoro-TTS to generate voice narration for course content, helping students better understand and absorb knowledge, especially for students who have difficulty with visual learning or prefer auditory learning.
- Character voice synthesis: In game development, Kokoro-TTS can generate distinctive voices for different characters, enhancing the game's immersion and the characters' personalities.
- Customer service response: Customer service systems can integrate Kokoro-TTS to implement automatic voice response functionality, quickly responding to customer inquiries and improving customer service efficiency.
- Voice assistant: Users can choose different voice packs according to their preferences to customize a personalized voice assistant, making voice interaction more natural and friendly.
- Advertising voiceover: Generate attractive voiceovers for advertising videos, enhancing the appeal and emotional impact of advertisements and improving advertising effectiveness.