Photo by the Author
The obvious Getting started
Text-to-speech (TTS) technology has advanced significantly, enabling many creators, including myself, to easily generate audio for presentations and demos. I often combine visuals with tools like velenlabs to create natural sounding narratives with natural quality recordings. The best part is that open models are quickly catching up with proprietary offerings, providing high fidelity, emotional depth, sound quality, and the ability to produce podcasts.
In this article, we will compare the top open TTS models currently available, discussing their technical specifications, speed, language support and specific capabilities.
The obvious 1. VileRiice
BiveVice An Advanced Text-to-Text (TTS) model designed to produce rich, long-lasting, dynamic audio presentations, such as podcasts, directly from text. It addresses long-standing challenges in TTS, including scaling, speaker dynamics, and time-consuming nature. This is achieved by combining a large language model (LLM) with an efficient continuous speech tokenizer operating at 7.5 Hz.
The model uses two paired tokens, one for acoustic processing and one for semantic processing, which helps maintain audio fidelity while allowing efficient handling of large sequences.
LLM's next Tower-Token approach enables LLM (Qwen2.5 in this release) to direct the flow and context of the conversation, while the lightweight head produces high acoustic detail. The system is capable of synchronizing up to 90 minutes of speech with four different speakers, which exceeds the standard limitation of 1 to 2 speakers found in previous models.
The obvious 2. Orpheus
Orpheus TTS Is a cutting edge LLM, LLAMA based LLM designed for high quality and sensitive applications. It is well-designed to deliver human-like speech with exceptional clarity and expressiveness, making it ideal for real-time use cases.
Essentially, Orpheus aims for low latency, efficient systems that benefit from TTS streaming while maintaining expressiveness and naturalness in its delivery. It's open on GitHub for researchers and developers, with usage instructions and examples available. In addition, it can be found with many managed demos and apis (such as depiinfra, replication, and fal.ai) and bye-bye quick test faces.
The obvious 3. Kokoro
Kokoro Is an open weight, 82 million-parameter-to-speech (TTS) model that offers quality comparable to the largest programs while remaining very fast and very expensive. Its Apache-licensed tools allow dynamic deployment, making it easy for both commercial and commercial projects.
For developers, Kokoro provides a direct Python API (KPipeline) Fast update with 24 sound generation. In addition, there is an official JavaScript (npm) A package available for streaming scenarios in both browsers and node.js systems, as well as selected samples and voices to test a variety of quality. If you prefer hosted acquisition, Kokoro is available through providers such as depinfra and multiple, offering simple HTTP APIs for easy integration into production systems.
The obvious 4. Operaudio
This page Openaudio S1 is the leading bilingual-to-speech (TTS) model, trained on over 2 million hours of audio. It is designed to produce highly expressive and lifelike speech in many languages.
The Operaudio S1 allows a deceptively good control of speech delivery, including various emotional tones and special marks (such as angry / happy, funny / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing / laughing. This enables functionality such as consultation.
The obvious 5. XTTS-V2
XTTS-V2 Is a versatile and production-ready voice generator model that powers a voice shot using a six-second reference clip. This new approach eliminates the need for extensive training data. The model supports cross-linguistic speech bubble generation and multilingual generation, allowing users to preserve the speaker's timbre while producing speech in different languages.
XTTS-V2 is part of the same main model family that powers Coqui studio and coqui api. It builds the torrent model with some enhancements that make it more robust for multiple languages and a specific language.
The obvious Wrapping up
Choosing a Text-to-Dissential (TTS) solution depends on your priorities. Here's a breakdown of some options:
- Vineviiines is ideal for long, multi-speaker interviews, using LLM-guided interviews.
- Orpheus TTS emphasizes intuitive delivery and supports real-time streaming
- Kokoro offers a fully licensed, cost-effective solution that enables fast shipping, delivering solid quality for its size
- Opelautio S1 offers extensive multi-language support and rich controls for mood and tone
- The XTTS-V2 allows for fast, cross-language audio coding at rates from just 6 samples
Each of these solutions can be optimized based on factors such as runtime, licenses, latency, language coverage, or exposure.
Abid Awan Awan (@ 1Abidaliawan) is a certified trainer for a scientist with a passion for machine learning models. Currently, he specializes in content creation and technical blogging on machine learning and data science technologies. Avid holds a master's degree in technology management and a bachelor's degree in telecommunication engineering. His idea is to build an AI product using a graph neural network for students struggling with mental illness.
