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lightweight

Piper

MIT

Tiny, fast, runs offline on a Raspberry Pi

Piper is the workhorse of local text-to-speech — built by the Rhasspy voice-assistant project to run in real time on devices as small as a Raspberry Pi. It offers a huge catalog of community voices across dozens of languages. Through the API you get the same dependable output without managing voice files or ONNX runtimes.

Voices

1 voice
Neutral
Defaultdefault
—
NeutralEmotionalNumbers & Dates

The scripts

Neutral
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog near the riverbank.”
Emotional
“I can't believe you actually did it. This is incredible!”
Numbers & Dates
“On March 14th, 2025, the team raised $4.2 million at a 38% margin.”

Install

pip install piper-tts

Piper FAQ

Do I need a GPU to run Piper?

No — Piper runs in real time on a CPU, no GPU required. It's one of the few open TTS models that does.

Can Piper clone voices?

No — Piper uses preset voices. Browse the voice-cloning category for models that clone from reference audio.

What license is Piper released under?

Piper is released under the MIT license. Always check the repository for the exact terms — some models license code and weights separately.

What languages does Piper support?

Piper supports English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, UK, Chinese, Arabic, Czech, DA, EL, FI, Hungarian, NO, SV, Turkish, Vietnamese, CA, RO, SK, SR, SL.

Is there a hosted Piper API?

Yes — OpenSpeech Cloud is launching hosted, pay-per-minute access to Piper and every other model in this directory. No CUDA, Docker, or GPU needed.