Piper

Piper is a fast and local neural text-to-speech engine that converts text into spoken audio.

Piper is a fast and local neural text-to-speech engine designed to synthesize voice audio from text inputs. It embeds espeak-ng for phonemization and provides multiple ways to interact with the software, including a command-line interface, a web server, and APIs for Python and C/C++. Users can also train new voices or build the software manually. It is utilized by various projects and applications like Home Assistant, NVDA, and LocalAI. The project supports integrations and language bindings such as Java Piper JNI.

Piper at a glance

Best for: Software engineer
Runs on: CLI, self-hosted, open source
Pricing: Free
Released: March 2025
Category: AI audio tool
Website: github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl

Key features

Neural text-to-speech synthesis
Phonemization via espeak-ng
Command-line interface
Web server API
Python API
C/C++ API
Tools for training new voices
Java JNI bindings

Use it for

Reading clipboard content aloud
Image captioning for visually impaired users
Integrating speech synthesis into home automation
Adding text-to-speech to games and clients

Alternatives to Piper

Pipecat — Builds real-time voice and multimodal agents with frame-level control.
Speaches — It acts as an Ollama equivalent for running local TTS and STT models.
AssemblyAI — Industry-leading speech models deliver high accuracy and low latency for voice applications.
Moonshine — Runs entirely in your browser with no audio leaving your device.
sherpa-onnx — Runs complex audio AI tasks offline on local devices and embedded hardware.
kokoro-onnx — Runs local TTS inference with efficient ONNX runtime performance.
Speech-to-Speech — Fully modular, swappable components with local or hosted execution options.
faster-whisper — Transcribes audio faster with lower memory usage than standard implementations.
Willow — Fast, private, open source voice control using local hardware.
audio.cpp — Runs modern audio models locally with high-performance, native C++ execution.
MOSS-TTS — Delivers zero-shot voice cloning and fine-grained pronunciation control.
FluidAudio — Runs local audio AI models on Apple Neural Engine.

All Piper alternatives