model · hexgrad (community)
Kokoro 82M (open source)
Kokoro is a genuinely surprising result: an 82-million-parameter, Apache-2.0-licensed text-to-speech model that produces voice quality competitive with systems many times its size, while running comfortably on a CPU or a modest 2-4GB of GPU memory. That makes it realistic to run on a student laptop, embed in a small app, or self-host without renting a server. Its even lighter sibling, Piper, trades a little quality for extreme efficiency — it's designed to run on hardware as small as a Raspberry Pi, the natural choice if you're building something like an offline audio kiosk or an accessibility device. Worth knowing: some other open TTS models with excellent voice-cloning (XTTS-v2, F5-TTS) are released under non-commercial licenses, so they're fine for a course project but not for anything you'd sell or deploy commercially — Kokoro's Apache-2.0 license doesn't have that restriction.
What it can help with
- text-to-speech
- cpu inference
- gpu lightweight
- offline synthesis
- raspberry-pi deployment
- open-source model
- apache-2.0 license