Local AI · Topic hub
Local Speech & TTS
Whisper transcription and offline voice — Kokoro, Piper, XTTS and Chatterbox on your own machine.
12 articles across guides, comparisons
Guides10
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GuidesFree AI Voice Generators That Are Actually Free
ElevenLabs' free tier is 10 minutes a month with an attribution catch. The genuinely free routes, hosted and local, mapped side by side with what each bans.
GuidesHow to Test Whisper Accuracy on Your Own Audio
Stop borrowing WER numbers from LibriSpeech. A 90-minute protocol to build a test set, score it with jiwer, catch hallucinations, and model local-vs-API cost.
GuidesAI Captions: The Accuracy Numbers Nobody Publishes
Whisper Large-v3 sits near 4.2% word error rate on clean audio. Dirty audio drops tools to 70-85%. The fix is upstream of whichever tool you picked.
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 2026 install, real VRAM numbers, and where narration quality 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 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. The install, the license change nobody mentions, and which tier fits a Pi 4 vs a Pi 5.
GuidesLocal Voice AI: Whisper, TTS & Offline Assistants (2026)
The self-hosted voice stack map: Whisper/faster-whisper for speech-to-text, Kokoro/Piper/Chatterbox/XTTS for voices, Ollama for the brain — wired 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
Faster-whisper, Piper, and Ollama wired into Home Assistant Assist, with real latency numbers for built-in intents, 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: 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.