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.
https://github.com/marytts/marytts
I’ve used MaryTTS semi-recently. It’s older but works well enough for my cases. I have it running on a server (locally) and my endpoints make a call to it and playback the returned audio file.
On Android, I use SherpaTTS which has good voices, but I’m not aware of a desktop/Linux option. It mentions using voices from Coqui which you linked, so I would guess that would be the way to go for desktop.
Sherpa links to this page, if anyone wants to preview what the voices sound like
https://huggingface.co/spaces/k2-fsa/text-to-speech
From the ones I’ve tried so far,
csukuangfj/vits-piper-en_US-amy-medium|1 speakersounded the most clear and natural for GPS / driving directions. If someone finds other good ones, I’d appreciate it :)