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.
At some point I’d like to play with separate voices and see if I could build something like NotebookLM for kind of like a radio morning show of news items I’ve gathered.
Kokoro is a really good model, considered it’s released 1.5 years ago. It’s punching above its weight https://5uck1ess.github.io/tts-bench/scores.html
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/local-reader-ai-on-...
I've been using my own solution since January. I'm on Linux, and can't use Aqua, Whipsrflow etc... So i made my own.
Recently cleaned it up and made it install friendly.
If anyone is interested, you can check it out here: https://github.com/Hugo0/voiceio
It's self-improving over time, runs on your local machine, and is generally decent software. 60% of my interaction with my PC nowadays is pure voice input.
I used to keep a version of whisperx around, because I think it's important to have not just transcription, but also timing and speaker identification (e.g. for subtitles)... It depends on pyannote, though, which has some wierd licensing (and is tougher to script the installs because of it), so I wanted to look at something that both had better transcription, and supported diarization (the speaker and timing). I decided on parakeet for the transcription with softformer (the diarization), but most of the available engines for it don't include softformer.
I coded up an OpenAI compatible server for parakeet-rs ( https://github.com/altunenes/parakeet-rs ) (which does support softformer) and I've been using it with OpenWhispr (a desktop app for transcription that handles all sorts of neat thing).
I'm doing CPU-only transcription (because I use my GPUs for other stuff and haven't gotten around to adding in the GPU-path), but it's incredibly empowering to be able to have local transcriptions at will.
For what you are doing, Senko works really well for diarization along with parakeet.
Faster and more accurate than Pyannote and whisper on my MacBook anyway.
Quality is very close.
Will vary in your setup, but here is my script: https://github.com/DavidVentura/translator-rs/blob/master/sc...
Would I be able to use this voice I already have with Kokoro? If not, is there any way to convert it? I could always go looking if someone made this specific voice but in .pt format, but I barely mess with AI and don't know how I could search for this.
I do wish there were better support for SSML, as well as deeper documentation of how to influence inflection in-line, but the default does well with standard emphasis (e.g. putting asterisks around text elements). Both asks are getting outside the zone of reasonable asks for this sort of distribution, though, and I remain incredibly grateful for the quality of what hexgrad and nazdridoy have put out in the world.
I am aware of the Option + Esc shortcut on osx for the onboard TTS but wow is it hard to listen to in 2026.
I speak over sonos speakers when certain events happen. And use it as my voice assistant.
the onnx version of pocket-tts does perform better. https://huggingface.co/KevinAHM/pocket-tts-onnx
If you're interested in an ONNX version and a permissively licensed TTS Tokenizer, I built a pipeline for that a while back: https://huggingface.co/NeuML/kokoro-base-onnx