Pocket TTS audio model

pocket‑tts (TTS that fits in your CPU) is an open-source text-to-speech model by Kyutai Labs released in January 2026. It’s designed to generate natural-sounding speech locally, efficiently, and without requiring a GPU — even on ordinary laptops or desktops.

• Lightweight, CPU-focused TTS engine that runs in real time on standard hardware (e.g., laptop CPUs).
• Voice cloning support — you can make it imitate a voice from a short sample.
• Targeted at developers who want TTS without cloud APIs or GPU requirements.

Model & Performance

• ~100 million parameters, making it very small for a modern speech model.
• Low latency: ~200 ms to first audio chunk and usually faster-than-real-time on CPUs.
• Only 2 CPU cores needed, and doesn’t require GPU-enabled PyTorch.

APIs & Interfaces

• Command-line interface (CLI) — for quick text-to-speech generation.
• Python library API — integrate into Python apps.
• Serve mode — run a local HTTP service to generate speech via REST calls.

Voice & Language

• Includes a small catalog of builtin voices.
• Voice cloning by providing a WAV file sample for personalization.
• Primarily English support in the core project (some tools outside can supply voices).

Usage Scenarios

• Local TTS engines for accessibility tools, desktop assistants, embedded applications.
• Temporary voice synthesis (e.g., reading text aloud).
• Prototyping speech apps without cloud dependency.

Limitations

• Current build only supports CPU (no browser or GPU builds yet).
• Primarily English — limited other language support out of the box.
• Does not yet support some advanced features like silence control or quantized int8 models.