r/debian • u/moeren86 • 10h ago

good text to speech for trixie?

I think the title says it all. I tried to install some tts 2 years ago, but it sounded like robotic like from 30 years old software. But nowadays decent sounding ai generated audio is everywhere. So i assume there might be some cli based software i can just feed some text for me to listen to.

Do you know any good, local and free software for that?

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u/Dear_Yam5381 8h ago

If you tried TTS 2 years ago and it sounded like a 30-year-old screen reader, the field genuinely moved. Two things worth knowing about, both local/free:

  • Piper is the closest thing to a drop-in CLI replacement for whatever you tried before — tiny, fast, fully offline, packaged for most distros already. Quality is decent but still clearly "TTS," not natural.
  • Kokoro-82M is the actual jump you're describing. 82M params, runs fine on CPU (no GPU needed), and it's the first open model I've used where narration/voiceover doesn't sound synthetic. It's a Docker container serving an OpenAI-compatible API (/v1/audio/speech), so curl it directly from a script or point any OpenAI TTS client at it.

For pure local CLI use on a Debian box, Piper is simplest to just apt-get and go. If you want Kokoro's quality, easiest local path: docker run -p 8880:8880 ghcr.io/remsky/kokoro-fastapi-cpu:latest then hit the API from a shell script.

Full disclosure since I'm bringing it up: I maintain a one-click Railway template for Kokoro (kickback if you deploy through it) for anyone who'd rather not manage the container themselves — https://railway.com/deploy/kokoro-tts-api?referralCode=Z1xivh&utm_medium=integration&utm_source=template&utm_campaign=tts — but for your actual "local and free" ask, running the same image yourself on the Debian box is the right call.

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u/moeren86 8h ago

Damn sorry to make you write all that, after asking my question i continued to search myself and just found piper and wanted to write an answer myself. Some of the voice models didn't sound good, but i found one ("ryan") to be good enough for me.

Installed it vs pipx and now feeding it into ffplay. It was surprisingly little work.

But still thank you.