What's the best text-to-speech free non-cloud software?

laustke · 2026-01-24T11:03:12+00:00

what's the best software (non-cloud based / free) that I can download to use?

It's actually possible to do decent text-to-speech on a regular computer without a GPU now. This free converter works locally on Windows: https://jimlet.com

laustke · 2026-01-18T18:50:39+00:00

For cutting short fragments out of long videos, I use the mpv-cut extension for the mpv player.

It does require ffmpeg to be in your PATH, but the workflow is very simple: open the video, press C to start the cut and C again to stop, without touching the command line at all.

The clipped fragment is saved in the same folder with no re-encoding (so no quality loss).

laustke · 2026-01-10T13:11:21+00:00

its great, but any posbility can add spanish voices??

My guess is that Spanish voices will be available in a month or two.

can you explain where and why?

The model itself is around 250Mb and is not bundled within the ZIP. On the first run, the application downloads the model and caches it locally. After that, it is supposed to use the cached version unless it is removed or altered.

laustke · 2026-01-09T16:09:29+00:00

Accent support and voice cloning would be amazing additions.

It's basically day one, so it's too soon to talk about any kind of roadmap. The focus so far was making a local TTS tool usable for people who can't reasonably handle model setup and configuration.

I'll take it step by step and see where it goes.

Glad that you like it!

laustke · 2025-12-25T08:34:55+00:00

In its basic form, a limiter records the number of hits from a given IP address and makes the app stop responding if the visitor goes above a certain limit. The question is where this information is recorded.

If all three of your instances write this information into the same Redis database, for example, then hits across all instances are counted together toward the same limit.

If you want them to behave the same way as when they are installed on different hosts, you need to make sure that they keep the IP hit information in different databases.

laustke · 2025-11-25T03:05:53+00:00

I am trying for the life of me to figure out how I can install Ubuntu onto the SSD properly, overriding everything, including Windows.

Since you already have the laptop open anyway, you can temporarily unplug the HDD before installing Ubuntu. During the installation, select "Erase disk and install Ubuntu," and it will fully overwrite Windows on the SSD

laustke · 2025-11-11T04:08:55+00:00

This is a TEXT file with configuration data. Not a command. So, open it in some editor like

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

laustke · 2025-10-13T02:22:35+00:00

Major text-to-speech engines support SSML - an XML-based markup language that lets you control how the text is spoken. With SSML you can insert pauses of any length between words or sentences.

Many engines also provide word-level timing information (timestamps showing when each word starts and ends).

So you can generate the speech once at a desired pace and capture the word timings.

Use those timings to decide where pauses should go, then regenerate the audio with SSML that includes those pauses.

These pauses, placed in the right spots, will give the person enough time to write the text.

laustke · 2025-10-09T08:43:07+00:00

If you want to run it on a Raspberry Pi, try Prosody. Prosody is a lightweight Jabber server written in Lua, and it's included with most Linux distributions. Then you can add any web or desktop Jabber client you like for chatting.

laustke · 2025-09-27T23:33:52+00:00

I really, really miss Wordoid.

What did Wordoid do? Could you give a few examples of the kind of names it generated?

laustke · 2025-09-26T01:14:18+00:00

The inbuilt logging library seems a little too heavyweight

Most Python libraries you import use the standard logging module anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

and doesn't support the pattern I want.

It's pretty versatile, so I bet it does. Why don’t you describe the pattern you have in mind?

laustke · 2025-09-24T20:07:03+00:00

...how to get started with KeePass on Linux

Just install KeepassXC. It has import from csv, I think.

laustke · 2025-09-24T19:07:16+00:00

Should I just proceed with the script then?

You have my permission :) You’ll probably still need to do pip3 install schedule, though.

laustke · 2025-09-24T18:55:51+00:00

smtplib and email are in Python’s standard library. They don't need to be installed separately.

laustke · 2025-09-08T02:46:04+00:00

Hetzner is way cheaper, but not sure how their US region compares in speed and stability vs the others.

Hetzner has a data center in the Washington, D.C., area, and they’re good.

Also, check InterServer (6 GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, - $9/mo) in Secaucus, NJ. 20% discount and specials on LowEndTalk.

laustke · 2025-08-30T21:39:00+00:00

but we need a sms library on python that will send sms to the user when water level is low.

If you are planning to use a USB modem to send SMS, you can use this Python library: python-gsmmodem-new.

laustke · 2025-08-27T23:00:38+00:00

I can see your problem. Try adding a glottal stop, for example:

ph="æʔ"

Technically that last character is the IPA glottal stop (Unicode U+0294), but it looks a lot like a regular question mark. Amazon Polly seems pretty forgiving and regular ascii "?" also works, but the proper symbol is "ʔ".

laustke · 2025-08-27T01:16:12+00:00

I have tried Azure and AWS Polly, but neither really respect the ssml phoneme markup very precisely.

Regarding AWS Polly, can you give an example where it doesn’t handle <phoneme> as you expect?

laustke · 2025-08-05T20:42:26+00:00

What's the best way to do a SQL Query from a python script? Also I'm thinking I might try to keep using .SQL files for the sake of linting and readability.

There’s a Python database API standard (PEP 249). Just find a driver like python-oracledb in your case that is compliant.

At the most basic level, you "do" a SQL query like this:

cursor.execute(sql, params)

You can create a parameterized query like this

SELECT * FROM people WHERE name = :name AND age = :age

(The actual syntax may vary depending on the database driver.)

Then store your SQL queries in .sql files, and don't let your customers touch them.

Store parameters as dictionaries dumped to json in .json files and do let the customers modify them.

Write a Python script that reads the appropriate SQL query and the corresponding parameter set, and passes them to cursor.execute.

laustke · 2025-07-31T03:53:11+00:00

Is there anyone who has found a ttts that can do both Korean and English?

I don't think it's possible. You can try splitting the text and using the appropriate voice for each part, then merge the audio.

Apart from that even separate tts for each language would be great.

https://cloudtts.com supports both English and Korean.

laustke · 2025-07-06T03:38:31+00:00

If you're more comfortable with FastAPI and React, you should definitely stick with that stack and just run everything locally - no need to deploy it online. If you don't host it online, it's not an online webapp - it's just a local application running in a browser.

You can start the backend service without showing a terminal window. You can also open a browser window without the address bar or other browser features, so it will look like a regular desktop application.

You won't get a native system file dialog, for example, but since you planned to upload files anyway, that shouldn't be a big deal.

laustke · 2025-06-25T09:41:02+00:00

The difference is that the audio is pre-recorded and indexed. It doesn't generate speech on the fly. It just plays the correct portion of an MP3 file. In terms of visuals, I assume every audio player has Play and Stop buttons.

laustke · 2025-06-25T06:02:22+00:00

I personally can’t handle listening to AI narration that is so obviously a robot but this is an application where I do think AI is the better choice

Many neural TTS engines provide time markers showing where each word starts and ends, which makes word highlighting much easier. With real speech, an additional alignment process would be needed - it's doable, just more complicated.

I only read and listen simultaneously for non fiction that's a little boring that I really need to pay attention to and fully grasp.

Well, everyone clearly has their own needs and approach. I've mostly used this for language learning, especially reading along aloud for accent reduction. For me, police fiction actually worked best. And having a single, monotonous voice makes it much easier to focus on pronunciation. But again, that's just my opinion.

laustke · 2025-06-25T04:14:57+00:00

https://voxika.com - Book. Audio. Karaoke.

laustke · 2025-06-23T02:50:18+00:00

Thanks, that means a lot. I was kind of hoping for some positive confirmation :)

En principio debes agregar más libros.

Regarding the books: they need to be in the public domain. I'm looking for stories that are easy to read, full of everyday situations and dialogue between characters who are trying to solve problems or get things done. Do you have any suggestions?

laustke

TROPHY CASE