Kokoro
Kokoro-82M, a small open-weight text-to-speech model that runs locally.
Liked as natural-sounding local text-to-speech1234 that is small enough for consumer hardware and phones,567 often used to turn ebooks and articles into audio.891011 The most common caveats are mistakes on some phrases and short utterances,1213 plus limited language support.14
Why people recommend it
Natural voice quality · 3
Commenters call it the best-sounding or most natural local TTS, holding up well against paid services.
“Best sounding local TTS engine I've heard by far is Kokoro”
“I use kokoro with home assistant and its great. I find its the most natural sounding and small too.”
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“I used Kokoro pretty extensively with an app I was developing over the last year and it's been excellent”
Audiobooks and articles · 3
Widely used to listen to ebooks, PDFs, articles and HN threads as audio.
“I love Kokoro. I use it to read ebooks that don't have audiobooks”
“Best sounding local TTS engine I've heard by far is Kokoro”
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“I do something similar with Kokoro, Cloudscraper, and Trafilatura”
Small and local · 3
Small enough to run on phones, laptops and home servers, with or without a GPU.
“Best sounding local TTS engine I've heard by far is Kokoro”
“I used Kokoro pretty extensively with an app I was developing over the last year and it's been excellent”
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“Kokoro for TTS”
Easy to build on · 3
Developers have wrapped it in MCP servers, CoreML ports, CLIs and APIs, and tuned it to run faster.
“Kokoro is great.”
“Love Kokoro tts.”
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“it runs 3x faster. Quality is very close.”
Home voice assistants · 2
Used as the TTS for Home Assistant voice setups.
“I use kokoro with home assistant and its great. I find its the most natural sounding and small too.”
Caveats and dissent
Pronunciation errors · 2
It makes mistakes on some common phrases, and short utterances are problematic.
“I use Kokoro 82M and it's good overall, but it does make mistakes on some common phrases”
“Love Kokoro tts.”
Limited languages · 1
It supports a limited number of languages, so Dutch, for example, needed other models.
“I love Kokoro. I use it to read ebooks that don't have audiobooks”
Limited control · 1
One user wants better SSML support and documentation on controlling inflection.
“I used Kokoro pretty extensively with an app I was developing over the last year and it's been excellent”
Speed varies · 1
One home-server user says it is not real-time fast.
“I use Kokoro 82M and it's good overall, but it does make mistakes on some common phrases”
Alternatives · 1
One commenter finds pocket-tts much better.
“kokoro is decent but pocket-tts is much better”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro 11 mentions
- Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup? 2 mentions
- Dessa: Conversation Model trained only on speech 1 mention
- Voxtral 3 1 mention
- Show HN: Use your OpenAI subscription to create audiobooks 1 mention
- Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB 1 mention
Also written as Kokoro TTS, Kokoro-82M, Kokoro 82M. Data: kokoro.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 23
“I use Kokoro 82M and it's good overall, but it does make mistakes on some common phrases”
“Best sounding local TTS engine I've heard by far is Kokoro”
“using MLX and Kokoro”
“Kokoro for TTS”
“Personally I use Kokoro with a python front-end on my Macbook”
“also uses Kokoro-82M”
“For my STT and TTS, ones on the HN front page right now”
“I love Kokoro. I use it to read ebooks that don't have audiobooks”
“Kokoro is a really good model, considered it’s released 1.5 years ago. It’s punching above its weight”
“I used Kokoro pretty extensively with an app I was developing over the last year and it's been excellent”
“Kokoro is great.”
“I use kokoro with home assistant and its great. I find its the most natural sounding and small too.”
“Kokoro for TTS”
“it runs 3x faster. Quality is very close.”
“Love Kokoro tts.”
“kokoro is surprisingly great at nuance”
“kokoro is decent but pocket-tts is much better”
“I do something similar with Kokoro, Cloudscraper, and Trafilatura”
“converts each sentence to audio via Kokoro TTS”
“it's actually unbelievably good”
“Internally it uses Parakeet, Kokoro TTS, Qwen3 TTS”
“Text-to-Speech (using Kokoro at the time)”
“We prioritize a self-hosted instance of Kokoro TTS (running on a Reserved VM) for high-quality, low-latency audio”