TTS

I am only doing this for private hobby projects.But I haven’t been up to date with the best TTS? Which one is it?

The ones that can show all types of emotions including grunts, etc, anger, screams, sadness.

Heya guys and gals,

Around a year ago I released and posted about Persona Engine as a fun side project, trying to get the whole ASR -> LLM -> TTS pipeline going fully locally while having a realtime avatar that is lip-synced (think VTuber). I was able to achieve this and was super happy with the result, but the TTS for me was definitely lacking, since I was using Sesame at the time as reference. After that I took a long break.

A week or two ago, I thought to give the project a refresh, and also wanted to see how far we have come with local models, and boy was I pleasantly surprised with Qwen3 TTS. During my initial tests it was lacking, especially the version published by the Qwen team themselves, but after digging around and experimenting a lot I was able to:

1. Make streaming with the model work reliably. The architecture of the model is perfect for this, since the decoder uses a sliding window, which means if you stream the LLM response, that's completely fine and the TTS will keep coherent prosody, pitch, and intonation.
2. Get the model working with llama.cpp, because I am using C# and speed is important, so also quantized it.
3. The model was lacking word-level timings and phonemes which Kokoro (the previous, more robotic sounding TTS) had. So I had to implement CTC word-level alignment to be able to know when certain words are spoken (important for subtitles + getting phonemes to have the lips move correctly).

Once this was all done, I also decided to finetune my own Qwen3-TTS voice. The cloning capabilities are really cool, but very lacking in contextual understanding and struggles with pronouncing. Additionally, the custom trained voices provided by the Qwen team didn't have any female native speakers, and I didn't want to create a new Live2D model.

In the end, the finetune blew me away and will probably continue improving it.

GitHub is here: [https://github.com/fagenorn/handcrafted-persona-engine](https://github.com/fagenorn/handcrafted-persona-engine)

Check it out, have fun, and let me know whatever crazy stuff you decide to do with it.

Hey, Im trying to see how much does synthetic data help with training ASR model. What is the best TTS? Im looking for something that sounds natural and not robotic. It would be really nice if the TTS could mimic english accents (american, british, french etc.). Thanks for the help.

I've tried several ways but not feeling satisfied:

1- chatterbox: too slow

2- Alltalk: never worked

3- system: bad quality

4- Kokoro: currently using but not impressed

\- what TTS way do you recommend?

\- If you mention elevenLab, is the price worth it? i did the calculation and it's 30 min per 5 dollar.

\- Edge, I know it's a privacy nightmare but is it worth it? I use openrouter anyway

\- I heard about Kitten TTS, and GPT-SoVITS v3 but nobody showed tutorial on how to use them on sillytavern

\- should I just wait for open router to give reasonable priced TTS API?

If you have low vram - qwen 3 tts is good

If you need something unique go for - tada 3b but it need 28gb vram

If you want best tts rn + have the commercial use allowed then go for - moss tts 8b its literally the best model out there

Literally voice clone is sooooooo powerful 😍

(Dont go for fish audio its not for commercial use but for fun its veryyyy good)

Edit: i found longcat DiT 3.5b its totally mind boggling. It is even better than MOSS 8b. And best at cloning voices