Piper
A fast, local neural text-to-speech engine maintained by the Open Home Foundation, used by Home Assistant and the NVDA screen reader, under GPL-3.0.
What it does
Piper is "a fast and local neural text-to-speech engine that embeds espeak-ng for phonemization", in its README's words. It is built for speed on small hardware rather than for cloning a voice: you pick a trained voice model and it speaks.
The project offers a command-line interface, a web server, a Python API, a C and C++ library (libpiper), a Java binding, and documentation for training your own voice. The README names Home Assistant, the NVDA screen reader, LocalAI and Open Voice Operating System among the projects that use it.
What it replaces
Piper replaces ElevenLabs where the job is to speak text on a device or a home server with no network call and no account, and where a preset voice is enough. The engine code is GPL-3.0, so a product that links it has to honour that licence; the voice models each carry their own licence, listed in the project's separate voices document, which this page has not read.
Where it falls short: the README does not list languages, does not describe voice cloning, and does not state a sample rate or streaming support. The samples page linked above is the way to hear what a given voice sounds like.
How it runs
pip install piper-tts for the CLI and the Python API. A web server mode exists for HTTP. The C/C++ library is for embedding. Hardware requirements are not stated, and the projects that use it, such as Home Assistant, run it on small machines.
The original repository at rhasspy/piper is archived and its README points to this one. The old repository was MIT; the current one is GPL-3.0.
Who it fits
A team building something that runs at the edge or in a home, a screen reader, or an assistant that must keep working offline. A team that wants voice cloning or an OpenAI-compatible API should look at the other entries; Speaches, under speech-to-text engines, serves Piper voices through that API shape.
Limits the README states
"The Open Home Foundation is looking for maintainers for Piper!" That is the project's own note on its capacity.
Sources
- Piper README and LICENSE: github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl, read 2026-09-16.
- The archived original: github.com/rhasspy/piper, read 2026-09-16.
More text to speech and voice cloning
A multilingual text-to-speech system with voice cloning from a 10 to 30 second clip and inline emotion tags, released with its weights under a research licence that requires a separate agreement for commercial use.
A family of text-to-speech models from Resemble AI under MIT, with zero-shot voice cloning from a reference clip and a multilingual model covering 23 languages.
A research text-to-speech model with zero-shot voice cloning whose code is MIT but whose pretrained weights are non-commercial, because of the dataset they were trained on.
A Docker image that serves the 82-million-parameter Kokoro model through an OpenAI-compatible speech endpoint, with streaming, voice mixing and nine languages, all under Apache-2.0.
Added September 16, 2026. Found an error on this page? Write to reveneau@licheo.com and it gets fixed in the next weekly pass.
Running one of these inside your own environment, with your own data and your own security rules, is the kind of work Reveneau does. Read how a forward deployed engagement works.