Kitten TTS
No written verdict yet. Here is what commenters said.
5recommend
2warn against
Jan 23, 2026first mention
Jul 25, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“KittenTTS runs fine on the exact same hardware”
“I'm impressed with the quality given the size.”
Show 3 more
“Kitten TTS is good as a small model, better than Kokoro”
“A 25MB TTS model”
“I'd also recommend checking out KittenTTS[2], I use it and it's great for the size/performance.”
builds a local voice assistanton “Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to…”
Caveats and dissent
“it will pull torch and NVIDIA CUDA packages (several GB), which are not needed to run kitten”
“It also then crashes for me, with:”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
From the makers not counted in the ranking
“you can try the models on our huggingface spaces demo”
Threads where it came up
- Show HN: Three new Kitten TTS models – smallest less than 25MB 7 mentions
- Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup? 3 mentions
- Inflect-v2: 3.9M and 9.3M parameter open-weight TTS models 1 mention
- Show HN: I built on-device TTS app because I run out of audiobooks on a flight 1 mention
- My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant 1 mention
Also written as KittenTTS. Data: kitten-tts.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 12
“competitive with much larger lightweight TTS systems, including KittenTTS, Piper, and Supertonic-3”
“KittenTTS runs fine on the exact same hardware”
“Added kitten (nano only, for now, will move on to mini)”
“featuring Kitten TTS and other engines”
“Yes, someone already made a web demo for it”
“it will pull torch and NVIDIA CUDA packages (several GB), which are not needed to run kitten”
“It also then crashes for me, with:”
“I'm impressed with the quality given the size.”
“Kitten TTS is good as a small model, better than Kokoro”
“there’s really no advantage over pocket TTS. There are some tradeoffs like Kitten doesn’t have streaming audio.”
“A 25MB TTS model”
“I'd also recommend checking out KittenTTS[2], I use it and it's great for the size/performance.”