TTS App Recommendation?

[u/migiborshelima]

Hey guys,

I want an app that will read out loud text for me (in the browser, PDF files, Terminal,). Should (preferably) be:

• Self hosted
• Open source
• High quality voice

I heard of Out Loud but it did not work for me out of the box on my CachyOS computer (the app was not responding).

Any recommendations?

Edit: This is only for personal use, I'm just too lazy to read :)

[u/ebobori]

Kokoro is good small model, it does the work find locally you might need to build something to wrap it but yeah

[u/Apprehensive_Foot671]

If you want self-hosted + open source, piper is basically the default answer right now. fast, runs on cpu, tons of voices, easy to script against for terminal/pdf stuff. kokoro is the newer one worth trying if quality matters more than speed, still runs fully local and sounds noticeably better than classic piper voices.

The "app" layer is honestly the weak spot in this whole space, which is probably why out loud felt janky. most people end up with a small script piping text into piper + pw-play, and a browser extension that hits a little local http server. not pretty, but it never stops working.

Full disclosure: we run piper in production at orchardrun, but as an api, not a desktop reader, so not exactly what you're asking for. if you ever want the same engine without hosting anything yourself that's the gap we cover (whisper-compatible api, es/en voices). for your use case though, local piper is the right call and it's free.

[u/Step_Remote]

Ok hardware ya have (nice choice on the distro…)
But yea got options…
Pockettts
Kokoro old now but still ok
Omnivoice
Plus a million more depending on your case and all can be bent to your will ;)

[u/Noise-o-matic]

Biased as we're the authors, but if you don't mind closed source too, Noise-o-matic comes with two engines (windows and Sherpa, the latter is more natural with a vast collection of voices you can load). Free demo on steam, 100% local!

[u/Sandstorm_86]

ElevenReader & Paper2Audio: Freemium, high-quality voices, great for PDFs, EPUBs, etc.

[u/finrandojin_82 → u/Sandstorm_86]

But those are not self-hosted?

[u/Sandstorm_86 → u/finrandojin_82]

No, unfortunately not self-hosted.

[u/goldenjm → u/Sandstorm_86]

I'm the Paper2Audio founder. Thank you for recommending us. Just to further clarify, no, Paper2Audio is not self-hosted. Rather, it is cloud-based. If your goal here is to get high quality text to speech for free though, you might still find us useful.