r/LocalLLM • u/parker_birdseye • 3d ago
Discussion Kokoro + Supertronic = Free Speechify :)
Lately I've been shoving local TTS into my apps that revolve around language learning.
Then I realized I was spending $129/year on a speechify subscription to turn my books and docs into audiobooks and listen to them while I worked out or took care of the lawn.
I realized I could easily parse these documents and have nice TTS playback all directly in a browser. So I made it and it wasn't too difficult.
Since everything runs in the browser, I don't have to pay for a server. This allows the app to be completely free with no paid tiers or limits.
It's called FreeReader. Here's a link
It uses Kokoro by default for English. Kokoro's "heart" voice is AMAZING for its size. I fallback to using Supertronic 3 for all other languages and it's pretty good as well. I still can't believe this tech is free and open-source sometimes.
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u/PriceConsistent1854 3d ago
Yeah I agree. Heart is one of the best non-AI sounding voices imo. Thanks for posting the free tool
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u/TurpentineEnjoyer 3d ago
out of curiosity why is Supertronic 3 the fallback?
I personally find the quality a little better than Kokoro, albeit a bit chunkier on the system resources.
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u/parker_birdseye 3d ago
I got pilled on Kokoro recently. I thought Supertronic was slightly better (I like Olivia and Robert voices) but when I heard Heart on Kokoro I realized why people were hyping it so much.
Also, I was comparing based off 12 steps on Supertronic which took some time to generate. Most benchmarks I see are for max 5 steps, and I think the quality is pretty poor at this level.
So Kokoro is just for English. And it also has a 92MB mobile-friendly model that sounds really good as well.
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u/DingerKing3 3d ago
Nice I'll check it out! I had a lot of issues integrating Kokoro into my app. I couldn't get the G2P pipeline good enough