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Re:Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) wi... by sudobash1 on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @04:37PM (#48823393)
I have used Kokoro fairly extensively for an accessibility product. I have loved working with it (especially because I don't have an NVidia GPU like many TTS of similar quality require).

I particularly appreciate the fact that it lets you manually add IPA pronunciation guides. There have been some cases where an important word is a homograph and Kokoro assumed the wrong pronunciation.

The place where it falls a little short is in saying just a single word or two. Try having it say simply "six" and it almost always says something like "ah-six-ah". I found a way around that though. If you give it a longer sentence to say (eg "The word is: six") it will say it fine. The trick is that the Kokoro API gives you the timestamp of each word in the sentence. So you can have a Python script crop out just the word you care about. The intonation is a little flat this way, but is very reliable.

I asked about this on the discord, and was told that it is a limitation of the small parameter size. But in fairness to Kokoro, even eleven-labs' voices suffer from this occasionally.

Re:Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) wi... by QuantumGood on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @07:03PM (#48825187)
Same trick with many others. I say "Knight" to Wispr or Google and see "night". I say "Knight to f3", and just backspace out "to f3".
Re:Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) wi... by QuantumGood on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @12:57PM (#48834335)
Of course, over time, I use custom entries.

My snippet expansion entry in Wispr is "Chess Knight" = "Knight" ("Knight to f3" without customization was more reliable than "Chess Knight")

I also use "dot bullet" = "•", as I like to separate thoughts with • more than ;

Re:Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) wi... by dr_dshiv on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @07:02PM (#48825171)
Great technique, thanks for sharing
Re:Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) wi... by cdr on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @09:45PM (#48826474)
It is indeed a common weakness of TTS models.

Unfortunately it makes it unsuited for my use case, which is almost entirely single words, as I don't particularly want to deal with stitching/segmenting input/output.