# Pocket TTS

41 Hacker News commenters recommended Pocket TTS and 16 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Small, fast local text-to-speech model that runs on CPU and clones voices from short clips. Critics note skipped words and a prohibited-use clause.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast on modest hardware (6 comments): "Pocket is small and fast and has good enough voice cloning." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741839)) "This works great! even on a phone with 2GB of RAM finally" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48836106)) "amazing quality and also crazy fast on both gpu and cpu" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748163))
- Good voice cloning (7 comments): "I've tried the voice clinking and it works great. I added a 9s clip and it captured the speaker pretty well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46643939)) "It is also very easy to make new voices from small sample files with pocket-tts." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48825290)) "pocket-tts is much better especially when you rip a good voice" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48822329))
- Natural, high-quality speech (5 comments): "The audio feels very natural and it's fairly good at handling complext text to speech tasks." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642843)) "Pocket TTS has more natural intonation and voice cloning." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48830559)) "amazing quality and also crazy fast on both gpu and cpu" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748163))
- Runs on laptops and phones (3 comments): "It's really pushing the envelope of what is possible to run locally on everyday devices." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644230)) "This works great! even on a phone with 2GB of RAM finally" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48836106)) "runs well on my macbook, much better than Samantha!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46643800))

## What people warn about

- Skips or reorders words (4 comments): "skips "we had nothing before us" and doesn't speak the final "that some of its noisiest"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642947)) "but the problem is Javert skips over parts of sentences!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641789)) "it skipped whole parts and then also moved words around" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642585))
- MIT license conflicts with prohibited use (2 comments): "It says MIT license but then readme has a separate section on prohibited use" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641133)) "the README containing a "Prohibited Use" section definitely creates a conflicting statement" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641521))
- Latency and realtime limits (2 comments): "it didn't solve the latency issues fully due to leading silence and artifacts generation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48834210)) "Not super productive for realtime work." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47444428))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [ElevenLabs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/elevenlabs.md): 59 recommend
- [Kokoro TTS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kokoro-tts.md): 59 recommend
- [Qwen3-TTS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qwen3-tts.md): 41 recommend
- [Kitten TTS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kitten-tts.md): 33 recommend
- [Piper TTS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/piper.md): 21 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Pocket TTS", https://hackerapproved.com/p/pocket-tts/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).