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rhasspy
piper
C++2023–2025
rhasspy / piper · Archived

piper

A fast, local neural text to speech system

AI & Machine Learning
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
30Distinct people
47Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
11.3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A fast, local neural text to speech system

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

Coqui is great, but another fantastic tool for TTS I recommend checking out is Piper. The voice quality is great, it's extremely lightweight, and it's fast enough to generate…

phyce used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 9:01:12 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month47 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2023-02-01 14:32:11 UTC to 2025-06-25 22:16:19 UTC.

0510152023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 commentsFeb 20232023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 2 submissions, 0 comments2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsApr 20242024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 0 submissions, 14 comments2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsJun 2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Feb 20232023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC202
Mar 20232023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20232023-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC202
May 20232023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC413
Jun 20232023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Jul 20232023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20232023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20232023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC220
Oct 20232023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Nov 20232023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC211
Dec 20232023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
Jan 20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC303
Feb 20242024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20242024-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20242024-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20242024-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC14014
Jun 20242024-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC211
Jul 20242024-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Aug 20242024-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Sep 20242024-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20242024-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC303
Nov 20242024-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Dec 20242024-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC202
Feb 20252025-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC202
Mar 20252025-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20252025-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC101
May 20252025-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20252025-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-07-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

3 sources
follower·Jan 18, 2024
If you're not already aware, the primary developer of Mimic 3 (and its non-Mimic predecessor Larynx) continued TTS-related development with Larynx and the renamed project Piper: https://github.com/rhasspy/piper Last year Piper development was supported by Nabu Casa for their "Year of Voice" project for Home Assistant and it sounds like Mike Hansen is going to continue on it with their support this year.
In WhisperSpeech – An open source text-to-speech system built by inverting Whisper
lucius_verus·Jan 11, 2024
Coqui-ai was a commercial continuation of Mozilla TTS and STT (https://github.com/mozilla/TTS). At the time (2018-ish), it was really impressive for on-device voice synthesis (with a quality approaching the Google and Azure cloud-based voice synthesis options) and open source, so a lot of people in the FOSS community were hoping it could be used for a privacy-respecting home assistant, Linux speech synthesis that doesn't suck, etc. After Mozilla abandoned the project, Coqui continued development and had some really impressive one-shot voice cloning, but pivoted to marketing speech synthesis for game developers. They were probably having trouble monetizing it, and it doesn't surprise me that they shut down. An equivalent project that's still in active development and doing really well is Piper TTS (https://github.com/rhasspy/piper).
In Coqui.ai Is Shutting Down
refulgentis·Jan 2, 2024
There isn't an ElevenLabs app like that, but I think that's the most expedient method, by far. (i.e. O(days) instead of O(months)) (warning: detailed opinionated take, I suggest skimming) Why? Local inference is hard. You need two things: the clips to voice model (which we have here, but bleeding edge), and text + voice -> speech model. Text to voice to speech, locally, has excellent prior art for me, in the form of a Raspberry Pi-based ONNX inference library called [Piper](https://github.com/rhasspy/piper). I should just be able to copy that, about an afternoon of work! :P Except...when these models are trained, they encode plaintext to model input using a library called eSpeak. eSpeak is basically f(plaintext) => ints representing phonemes. eSpeak is a C library and written in a style I haven't seen in a while and depends on other C lib
Read the rest
raries. So I end up needing to port like 20K lines of C to Dart...or I could use WASM, but over the last year, I lost the ability to be able to reason through how to get WASM running in Dart, both native and web. Re: ElevenLabs I had looked into the API months ago and vaguely remembered it was _very_ complete. I spent the last hour or two playing with it, and reconfirmed that. They have enough API surface that you could build an app that took voice recordings, created a voice, and then did POSTs / socket connection to get audio data from that voice at will. Only issue is pricing IMHO, $0.18 for 1000 characters. :/ But this is something I feel very comfortable saying wouldn't be _that_ much work to build and open source with a "bring your own API key" type thing. I had forgotten about Eleven Labs till your post, which made me realize there was an actually meaningful and quite moving use case for it. All of Elevens advantages (cloning, peak quality by a mile) come into play, and the disadvantages are blunted: local voice cloning isn't there yet, and $0.18 / 1000 characters doesn't matter as much when it's interpersonal exchanges instead of long AI responses
In OpenVoice: Versatile Instant Voice Cloning

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