Model · Rhasspy · Text-To-Speech
Piper
A fast, local TTS designed for Raspberry Pi-class hardware. Powers most self-hosted voice assistants where Whisper handles input and Piper handles output. Now maintained by the Open Home Foundation under GPL-3.0.
- Modality
- Text-To-Speech
- License
- GPL-3.0 (Open weights)
- Released
- April 1, 2023
- Last verified
- October 28, 2026
- Runs locally
- Yes
What you need to run it
- Mac
- Yes. Any Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer) with at least 8 GB of memory. Newer chips are faster, but memory is what decides whether it runs.
- No graphics card
- Works. Runs on a normal computer's processor, just slower.
Built to run in real time on a Raspberry Pi 4, so any Mac or CPU-only PC is plenty.
Numbers are for: ONNX voice files (about 20 to 100 MB each). Our estimate from the model’s size — the maker publishes no figure.
Strengths
- Real-time on a Raspberry Pi 4
- Fully offline
- Many community-trained voices and languages; the voice files themselves are MIT
Weaknesses
- Voice quality below cloud TTS — clearly synthetic
- Per-voice training is non-trivial
- The maintained engine is GPL-3.0: shipping it inside a closed-source product means releasing your source under GPL too
Try it
| Where | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub | local | Active repo (GPL-3.0), maintained by the Open Home Foundation. rhasspy/piper is archived. |
| Hugging Face voices | weights | Pre-trained voices (MIT) |
Official sources
- GitHub github
Change log
- — Added hardware requirements (Mac support, memory, NVIDIA). Source: https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl + rhasspy/piper-voices.
- — Licence corrected from MIT to GPL-3.0. The MIT licence belonged to the original rhasspy/piper repo, which is archived (read-only); the only maintained code, OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl, is GPL-3.0 (confirmed via the GitHub API). The rhasspy/piper-voices files on Hugging Face remain MIT. Still active: v1.8.0 (2026-09-04) is the latest release and the repo was pushed 2026-10-25.
- — Verified actively maintained: OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl shipped v1.8.0 on 2026-09-04, with v1.5.0 through v1.7.0 across July and August 2026. The Open Home Foundation's README notes it is seeking maintainers.
- — Repointed to active repo OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl (rhasspy/piper archived 2025-10-06; latest release v1.4.2, 2026-04-02).
- — Initial entry.
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