15 Open-source Text To Speech TTS Apps and Libraries

15 Open-source Text To Speech TTS Apps and Libraries
Photo by DeepMind / Unsplash

What is Text-to-Speech?

Text-to-speech or speech synthesis is an artificially generated human-sounding speech from text that recognize words and formulate human speech.

The first Text-To-Speech system was introduced to the world in 1968 by Noriko Umeda et al, at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Japan.

In 1961, physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr and his colleague Louis Gerstman used an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech, an event among the most prominent in the history of Bell Labs.

16 Open-source and Free TTS (Text-To-Speech) Programs for Windows
TTS apps, or Text-to-Speech apps, are software applications that use speech synthesis to convert written text into spoken words. This technology is particularly useful for people with visual impairments or reading difficulties, as well as for those who want to multitask while still consuming written…

The benefits of TTS?

OpenTTS: Open Text to Speech Server
OpenTTS: Open Text to Speech Server

The primary advantageous of this technology are people with visual and reading impairments, as they were its first users.

Nowdays, many YouTube channels use this technology in order to minimize their edit and increase their production.

In many modern operating system, Text-to-speech is a built-in accessibility feature to assist people who cannot read on-screen text easily.

About this list

In this article we offer you our collection of free, open-source Text-To-Speech (TTS) and speech synthesis apps. You can also find a new updated list for more open-source web-based TTS apps and services.

1- MARY TTS

MARY TTS is an open-source, multilingual text-to-speech synthesis system written in pure java. It is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

MARY TTS is released under the LGPL-3.0 License.

GitHub - marytts/marytts: MARY TTS -- an open-source, multilingual text-to-speech synthesis system written in pure java
MARY TTS -- an open-source, multilingual text-to-speech synthesis system written in pure java - GitHub - marytts/marytts: MARY TTS -- an open-source, multilingual text-to-speech synthesis system wr…

2- Kaldi

Kaldi is a toolkit for speech recognition written in C++ and licensed under the Apache License v2.0.The source code is available at GitHub.

Kaldi can run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It also can run on Android, PowerPC, and with Web Assembly.

Kaldi ASR
Kaldi ASR

3- OpenTTS

OpenTTS is a free, open-source Open Text to Speech Server written in Python. It is released under the MIT License. It supports several languages, and comes with an easy-to-use interface. Furthermore, it comes with numerous alternatives libraries.

Supported languages: English (27), German (7), French (3), Spanish (2), Dutch (4), Russian (3), Swedish (1), Italian (2), Swahili (1), Finnish, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Swedish, and more.

GitHub - synesthesiam/opentts: Open Text to Speech Server
Open Text to Speech Server. Contribute to synesthesiam/opentts development by creating an account on GitHub.

4- eSpeak

eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows. It supports several languages, and comes with dozens of useful features, which makes it the ideal choice for many users.

eSpeak: Speech Synthesizer

Supported languages

Afrikaans, Albanian, Aragonese, Armenian, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kannada, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Lojban, Macedonian, Malaysian, Malayalam, Mandarin, Nepalese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh.

5- Text To Speech Converter

This open-source project allows you to convert any text into speech easily by copying and paste the text into its simple interface. It is written in C# programming languages and runs on Windows for now.

GitHub - avi-jkiapt/textToSpeechConverter: Convert text to Speech
Convert text to Speech. Contribute to avi-jkiapt/textToSpeechConverter development by creating an account on GitHub.

6- ONLINE TTS

ONLINE TTS is a simple HTML/ JavaScript project that turns your English text into a formidable speech.

ONLINE TTS features simple shortcuts, and a clean user-interface.

GitHub - therealvasanth/online-tts: Online TTS is a free text to speech converter. Powered by ResponsiveVoice JS.
Online TTS is a free text to speech converter. Powered by ResponsiveVoice JS. - GitHub - therealvasanth/online-tts: Online TTS is a free text to speech converter. Powered by ResponsiveVoice JS.

7- Flite

Flite is a small, fast run-time synthesis library suitable for embedded systems and servers. The core Flite library was developed by Alan W Black awb@cs.cmu.edu (mostly in his so-called spare time) while employed in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Flite supports Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, FreeBSD, and several other systems.

Flite: a small fast run-time synthesis engine
Flite: a small fast run-time synthesis engine

8- Julius

Julius is an open-source large vocabulary continuous speech recognition engine.

It is a high-performance, small-footprint large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) decoder software for speech-related researchers and developers. Based on word N-gram and context-dependent HMM.

Julius is a lightweight open-source Speech Recognition Engine
“Julius” is a high-performance, small-footprint large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) decoder software for speech-related researchers and developers. It is primarily written for C programming language. The algorithm is based on 2-pass tree-trellis search, which fully incorporates…

9- Athena

Athena is an open-source implementation of sequence-to-sequence based speech processing engine

Athena features

Hybrid Attention/CTC based end-to-end ASR

  • Speech-Transformer
  • Unsupervised pre-training
  • Multi-GPU training on one machine or across multiple machines with Horovod
  • End-to-end Tacotron2 based TTS with support for multi-speaker and GST
  • Transformer based TTS and FastSpeech
  • WFST creation and WFST-based decoding
  • Deployment with Tensorflow C++
GitHub - athena-team/athena: an open-source implementation of sequence-to-sequence based speech processing engine
an open-source implementation of sequence-to-sequence based speech processing engine - GitHub - athena-team/athena: an open-source implementation of sequence-to-sequence based speech processing engine

10- ESPnet: end-to-end speech processing toolkit

ESPnet is an end-to-end speech processing toolkit, mainly focuses on end-to-end speech recognition and end-to-end text-to-speech.

It is a developer-friendly application that can integrated into web projects. Developers also can install it using Docker.

ESPnet: end-to-end speech processing toolkit — ESPnet 202304 documentation

11- Voice Builder

Voice Builder is an open source text-to-speech (TTS) voice building tool that focuses on simplicity, flexibility, and collaboration. Our tool allows anyone with basic computer skills to run voice training experiments and listen to the resulting synthesized voice.

The Voice Builder project is written using JavaScript and released under the Apache-2.0 License.

GitHub - google/voice-builder: An opensource text-to-speech (TTS) voice building tool
An opensource text-to-speech (TTS) voice building tool - GitHub - google/voice-builder: An opensource text-to-speech (TTS) voice building tool

12- Coqui TTS

Coqui TTS is a library for advanced Text-to-Speech generation. It's built on the latest research, was designed to achieve the best trade-off among ease-of-training, speed and quality.

GitHub - coqui-ai/TTS: 🐸💬 - a deep learning toolkit for Text-to-Speech, battle-tested in research and production
🐸💬 - a deep learning toolkit for Text-to-Speech, battle-tested in research and production - GitHub - coqui-ai/TTS: 🐸💬 - a deep learning toolkit for Text-to-Speech, battle-tested in research and pro…

13- Mozilla TTS

Mozilla TTS is a library for advanced Text-to-Speech generation. It's built on the latest research, was designed to achieve the best trade-off among ease-of-training, speed and quality.

GitHub - mozilla/TTS: :robot: Deep learning for Text to Speech (Discussion forum: https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/tts)
:robot: :speech_balloon: Deep learning for Text to Speech (Discussion forum: https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/tts) - GitHub - mozilla/TTS: :robot: Deep learning for Text to Speech (Discussion foru…

14- Mycoft Mimic

Mycroft is an open-source voice assistant system. Mimic is the built-in TTS library created by Mycroft team.

Mimic 1 - Mycroft AI
Mimic 1 is a fast, light-weight Text to Speech engine developed by Mycroft AI and VocaliD.

15- Free TTS

FreeTTS: Cross-platform Text-To-Speech App
FreeTTS is a speech synthesis system written entirely in the JavaTM programming language. It is based upon Flite: a small run-time speech synthesis engine developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Flite is derived from the Festival Speech Synthesis System from the University of Edinburgh and the Fest…

If you know any other open-source TTS application, toolkit, or library that we didn't mention here, let us know.

15 Open-source Text To Speech TTS Apps and Libraries
What is Text-to-Speech? Text-to-speech or speech synthesis is an artificially generated human-sounding speech from text that recognize words and formulate human speech. The first Text-To-Speech system was introduced to the world in 1968 by Noriko Umeda et al, at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in…
Best 10 Free Text To Speech (TTS) Services
Text-to-speech (TTS) technology is a valuable tool for individuals and businesses alike. With TTS, you can convert text into spoken audio, allowing you to listen to written content instead of reading it. This is particularly useful for people who have difficulty reading, such as those with dyslexia…
Free Offline Text to Speech TTS Program for Windows
Text-to-Speech application. This app is Free to use, offline application. Build on top of Windows Form, uses Windows installed Synthesis. You choose one of the available voices, and make it read text, download as .wav file on your Desktop, under Audio Files folder. It offers a basic and advanced mo…







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