so i yes, espeak exists and still sounds terrible even worse than picoTTS (last update 4 yrs ago?). so what else is there? i look at mimic3 and it says they are dead and one should go for piper here: https://github.com/MycroftAI/mimic3 the link to piper followed I get: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper "This repository was archived by the owner on Oct 6, 2025. It is now read-only. "
ok, so coqui? https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS no update in over 12 months…how bad can it be? https://coqui.ai/ …great it is a page for gambling now.
so, what are you using? gTTS is not offline.
@[email protected] pointed me to piperTTS and i ended up with a python virtual enviroment, pip install piper-tts and de_DE-thorsten-high.onnx+json to be able to run
echo "{{ $json.state}}" | piper -m ./de_DE-thorsten-high.onnx -f voice.wav && aplay voice.wavand indeed that sounds much better than pico and espeak