Piper TTS
Hacker ApprovedRanked 6 of 18 text-to-speech models by recommenders
Fast, free, open-source neural text-to-speech with usable out-of-box voices, mostly for notifications and system messages. Common caveat: voices sound robotic or machine-like.
Fast, free, open-source neural text-to-speech with usable out-of-box voices, mostly for notifications and system messages. Common caveat: voices sound robotic or machine-like.
27 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 21
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 78%
Recommended in 10 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 21 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 10 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Open-source, non-proprietary voices
“highlight open-source Piper TTS and non-proprietary voices”
Comment from 8 Feb 2026 in “ShowHN: Make OpenClaw respond in Scarlett Johansson’s AI Voice from the Film Her” “Please use open source Piper TTS”
Comment from 8 Feb 2026 in “ShowHN: Make OpenClaw respond in Scarlett Johansson’s AI Voice from the Film Her” Fast output for TTS
“the results are pretty great and the output is a fast TTS model”
Comment from 19 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: Three new Kitten TTS models – smallest less than 25MB” “it's fast but yeah, it doesn't sound great”
Comment from 11 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: RunAnwhere – Faster AI Inference on Apple Silicon” Works out of the box
“I've been using piper to announce claude code notifications and it works perfectly!”
Comment from 7 Jul 2026 in “Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro” “I'm impressed with the out of the box stuff already”
Comment from 13 Apr 2026 in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)” Sufficient for notifications and system messages
“I've been using piper to announce claude code notifications and it works perfectly!”
Comment from 7 Jul 2026 in “Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro” “It is not perfect, but quite sufficient for simple system messages.”
Comment from 12 Feb 2026 in “Warcraft III Peon Voice Notifications for Claude Code”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Voices sound robotic or machine-like
“it's fast but yeah, it doesn't sound great”
Comment from 11 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: RunAnwhere – Faster AI Inference on Apple Silicon” “The way piper-tts work under the hood make it sound more machine-like.”
Comment from 24 Sep 2026 in “Kev: Tiny Jev-like family of decision models built on top of Qwen3.5”
Other text-to-speech models people recommend
The four most recommended other text-to-speech models, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | 59 | 20 | 75% | 13 | — | Approved |
| Kokoro TTS | 59 | 9 | 87% | 11 | 1 mo3 owners | Approved |
| Pocket TTS | 41 | 16 | 72% | 8 | — | Approved |
| Qwen3-TTS | 41 | 13 | 76% | 7 | — | Approved |
| Piper TTSThis page | 21 | 6 | 78% | 10 | — | Approved |
What people said
20 of the 28 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Piper's system of linear indices has a few nice properties”
“The way piper-tts work under the hood make it sound more machine-like.”
“I didn't know I wanted this!”
“Piper seems to barely work. Any time I try to rebind keys, it usually errors out with something incomprehensible.”
“piper itself used to trip up the agents a lot”
“piper has scaled very well since it was already at uni”
“piper has scaled very well since it was already at unimaginable commit velocity”
“I've been using piper to announce claude code notifications and it works perfectly!”
“Google: Piper via CitC (Clients in the Cloud) often used with Cider (web IDE)”
“I'm impressed with the out of the box stuff already”
“the results are pretty great and the output is a fast TTS model”
“kokoro and piper are trained on read speech”
“supports the majority of mice”
“it's fast but yeah, it doesn't sound great”
“It is not perfect, but quite sufficient for simple system messages.”
“highlight open-source Piper TTS and non-proprietary voices”
“Please use open source Piper TTS”
“It's _ALOT_ better than festival afaik.”
“Sadly the project feels semi-abandoned. No new releases so I had to build it from source.”
“most output weird garble noises at unpredictable times along with the good output”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.