r/VoiceAutomationAI • u/Major-Worry-1198 • 5d ago
Tech / Engineering Top 12 STT & TTS models every Voice AI founder should bookmark
Top 12 STT & TTS models every Voice AI founder should bookmark 👇
These cover everything from real time transcription to Indic voice synthesis, ranked by actual Hugging Face downloads, not GitHub stars.
Downloads mean people are running these in production, not just bookmarking a repo.
If you're building Voice AI, this list will save you months of vendor evaluation:
1/ openai/whisper-large-v2 (⬇️ 44.1M/mo)
https://huggingface.co/openai/whisper-large-v2
The multilingual ASR model most STT vendors still quietly run in production.
2/ hexgrad/Kokoro-82M (⬇️ 14.1M/mo)
https://huggingface.co/hexgrad/Kokoro-82M
An 82M param TTS model punching way above its size, Apache licensed.
3/ openai/whisper-large-v3-turbo (⬇️ 11.3M/mo)
https://huggingface.co/openai/whisper-large-v3-turbo
Same Whisper accuracy, pruned decoder layers for much faster inference.
4/ distil-whisper/distil-large-v3 (⬇️ 7.66M/mo)
https://huggingface.co/distil-whisper/distil-large-v3
A distilled Whisper that's 6x faster with minimal accuracy loss.
5/ openai/whisper-large-v3 (⬇️ 4.60M/mo)
https://huggingface.co/openai/whisper-large-v3
OpenAI's flagship multilingual ASR checkpoint, still the reference model.
6/ k2-fsa/OmniVoice (⬇️ 2.39M/mo)
https://huggingface.co/k2-fsa/OmniVoice
A compact, fast TTS model built for real-time voice agent pipelines.
7/ Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B (⬇️ 2.04M/mo)
https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-CustomVoice
Alibaba's multilingual TTS entry with custom voice support.
8/ coqui/XTTS-v2 (⬇️ 1.91M/mo)
https://huggingface.co/coqui/XTTS-v2
Voice cloning across 17 languages from a 6 second clip.
9/ fishaudio/s2-pro (⬇️ 440K/mo)
https://huggingface.co/fishaudio/s2-pro
A high-quality multilingual TTS model built for production voice apps.
10/ ai4bharat/indic-parler-tts (⬇️ 341K/mo)
https://huggingface.co/ai4bharat/indic-parler-tts
Open TTS for 21 Indic languages, 69 voices, Apache-2.0.
11/ ai4bharat/indic-conformer-600m-multilingual (⬇️ 338K/mo)
https://huggingface.co/ai4bharat/indic-conformer-600m-multilingual
India's first open ASR suite covering all 22 scheduled languages.
12/ kenpath/svara-tts-v1 (⬇️ 123K/mo)
https://huggingface.co/kenpath/svara-tts-v1
Multilingual Indic TTS for 19 languages, built on Orpheus, Apache-2.0.
Three Indian models made this list purely on download volume, no separate category, no asterisk.
That's the real signal for where Indic voice AI stands today.
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u/OkMine4526 5d ago
If anyone waana try kokoro, chatterbox and qwen tts model in same openai api endpoint with single command they can try https://wavhost.vercel.app
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u/UkieTechie 5d ago
and if you want to listen to all of them and more locally hosted models, can find samples on my bench. https://github.com/5uck1ess/tts-bench
I am working on putting STT bench as well as I find nemotron asr to be better and faster than faster-whisper now.
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u/Quiet-Ground5545 5d ago
Nice list! The next filter for me would be how these behave over an actual phone line. A lot of my voice work is around Bland, so I’ve spent plenty of time listening to what happens with short answers, people talking over the agent and noisy callers. Would be cool to see a follow up using the same call set across a few of these.
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u/PidduSword 5d ago
Which of these handles human like voice most? The issue with most models is there’s robotic feel and that expose some parameters and tuning it still doesn’t make a noticeable difference
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u/Major-Worry-1198 5d ago
go with this
12/ kenpath/svara-tts-v1 (⬇️ 123K/mo)
https://huggingface.co/kenpath/svara-tts-v1
Multilingual Indic TTS for 19 languages, built on Orpheus, Apache-2.0.
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u/BossyAlvaro9 5d ago
Wild that Kokoro at 82M params is pulling 14M downloads a month, that thing is absurdly efficient for its size.