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Local Speech & TTS
Whisper transcription and offline voice — Kokoro, Piper, XTTS and Chatterbox on your own machine.
9 articles across guides, comparisons
Guides7
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GuidesXTTS Voice Cloning Locally: Clone Any Voice, Fully Offline
XTTS clones a voice from a 6-second sample on your own GPU, fully offline. The correct 2026 install, real VRAM numbers, and where long-form narration quality actually breaks down.
GuidesVoxtral: Mistral's Offline Transcription Model, Tested
Mistral's Voxtral runs speech-to-text fully offline under Apache 2.0, in 3B and 24B sizes. VRAM needs, how it differs from Whisper, and the browser build.
GuidesRun Whisper Locally: Free Offline Transcription (2026)
faster-whisper install to first transcript, the large-v3-vs-turbo call I actually make, and what a real file costs on a GPU versus a CPU, with no API bill involved.
GuidesPiper TTS: Fast Offline Voice Synthesis on a Raspberry Pi
Piper runs real-time neural text-to-speech on a Raspberry Pi with no GPU at all. The install, the license change nobody mentions, and which quality tier actually fits a Pi 4 versus a Pi 5.
GuidesLocal Voice AI: Whisper, TTS & Offline Assistants (2026)
The complete map of the self-hosted voice stack: Whisper and faster-whisper for speech-to-text, Kokoro/Piper/Chatterbox/XTTS for voices, Ollama for the brain, and how they wire together offline.
GuidesKokoro TTS Locally: The 82M-Parameter Voice Model Setup
Why a tiny Apache-2.0 model with no voice cloning is still the narration tool I install first, plus the actual pip-install-to-first-spoken-line steps.
GuidesBuild a Fully Offline Voice Assistant With Home Assistant
The complete faster-whisper, Piper, and Ollama pipeline wired into Home Assistant Assist, with real latency numbers across built-in intents, a GPU tier, and CPU-only Raspberry Pi hardware.
Comparisons2
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ComparisonsKokoro vs Chatterbox vs XTTS: Best Local TTS in 2026
A same-question comparison of the three local voice models that actually matter: what each one clones, what license lets you ship, and which one your hardware can even run.
Comparisonsfaster-whisper vs OpenAI Whisper: 4x Speed, Same Accuracy?
SYSTRAN's own benchmark table doesn't hit the 4x it advertises. I did the division on their published numbers so you don't have to take the headline on faith.