Re:Show HN: Three new Kitten TTS models – smallest less than...
by rohan_joshi on Friday March 20, 2026 @12:08AM
(#47450380)
thanks a lot for sharing this, its v helpful for fixing the env issues. we'll fix all of them by the weekend.
On macOS, it's a markedly different experience: it's only ~700 MiB there; I'm assuming b/c no NVIDIA libs get pulled in, b/c why would they.
For anyone who might want to play around with this: I can get down to ~3 GiB (& about 1.3 GiB if you wipe your uv cache afterwards) on Linux if I add the following to the end of `pyproject.toml`:
& add "torch" to the direct dependencies, b/c otherwise it seems like uv is ignoring the source? (… which of course downloads a CPU-only torch.)This is an example of what one sees under Linux:
That's not all the libraries, either, but you can see NVIDIA here is easily over 1 GiB.It also then crashes for me, with:
Which seems to be [this bug in spacey](https://github.com/explosion/spaCy/issues/13895), so I'm going to have to try adding `<3.14` to `requires-python` in `pyproject.toml` too I think. That is, for anyone wanting to try this out: (This isn't really something KittenTTS should have to do, since this is a bug in spacey … and ideally, at some point, spacey will fix it.)Also:
This version is so utterly ancient that there aren't wheels for it anymore, so that means a loooong wait while this builds. It's pulled in via misaki, and my editor says your one import of misaki is unused.Hilariously, removing it breaks but only on macOS machine. I think you're using it solely for the side-effect that it tweaks phonemizer to use espeakng, but you can just do that tweak yourself, & then I think that dependency can be dropped. That drops a good number of dependencies & really speeds up the installation since we're not compiling a bunch of stuff.
You need to add `phonemizer-fork` to your dependencies. (If you remove misaki, you'll find this missing.)