Piper
A fast, lightweight text-to-speech engine designed to run offline on low-resource hardware, right down to a Raspberry Pi. It is the default local voice for Home Assistant, with many voices across a range of languages.
Strengths
- Very fast and light, runs offline on modest hardware
- A wide range of voices and languages
- Well established, and the standard TTS in Home Assistant
Weaknesses
- Voices sound less natural than the newest neural TTS models
- The original repository was archived in October 2025, with development moving to a GPL-3.0 fork
- Less expressive control than models built for emotion and style
At a glance
- Licence
- GPL-3.0
- Pricing
- Free
- Platforms
- Linux, macOS, Windows
- GPU required
- No
Links
Works with
Entry last verified 30 July 2026.