Self-hosted text-to-speech with Kokoro: no cloud, no subscription
I got tired of cloud TTS for a home project. Every option was a subscription, a per-character API bill, or a voice that sounded like a 2012 satnav. So I set up Kokoro on my mini PC — a proper neural text-to-speech model running locally, and it sounds genuinely good. Kokoro is an open TTS model (Apache 2.0, 82M parameters). I run the full-precision ONNX export: about 340MB of model and voice data, served through ONNX Runtime on CPU. No GPU anywhere in the picture. On an N100 it renders speech faster than real time without getting warm. ...