application-text-to-speech

Kokoro is an open-weight TTS model with 82 million parameters. Despite its lightweight architecture, it delivers comparable quality to larger models while being significantly faster and more cost-efficient. With Apache-licensed weights, Kokoro can be deployed anywhere from production environments to personal projects.

<audio controls><source src="https://huggingface.co/hexgrad/Kokoro-82M/resolve/main/samples/HEARME.wav" type="audio/wav"></audio>

🐈 GitHub: https://github.com/hexgrad/kokoro

🚀 Demo: https://hf.co/spaces/hexgrad/Kokoro-TTS

[!NOTE] As of April 2025, the market rate of Kokoro served over API is under $1 per million characters of text input, or under $0.06 per hour of audio output. (On average, 1000 characters of input is about 1 minute of output.) Sources: ArtificialAnalysis/Replicate at 65 cents per M chars and DeepInfra at 80 cents per M chars.

This is an Apache-licensed model, and Kokoro has been deployed in numerous projects and commercial APIs. We welcome the deployment of the model in real use cases.

[!CAUTION] Fake websites like kokorottsai_com (snapshot: https://archive.ph/nRRnk) and kokorotts_net (snapshot: https://archive.ph/60opa) are likely scams masquerading under the banner of a popular model.

Any website containing "kokoro" in its root domain (e.g. kokorottsai_com, kokorotts_net) is NOT owned by and NOT affiliated with this model page or its author, and attempts to imply otherwise are red flags.

• Releases
• Usage
• EVAL.md ↗️
• SAMPLES.md ↗️
• VOICES.md ↗️
• Model Facts
• Training Details
• Creative Commons Attribution
• Acknowledgements

Releases

Usage

You can run this basic cell on Google Colab. Listen to samples. For more languages and details, see Advanced Usage.

!pip install -q kokoro>=0.9.2 soundfile
!apt-get -qq -y install espeak-ng > /dev/null 2>&1
from kokoro import KPipeline
from IPython.display import display, Audio
import soundfile as sf
import torch
pipeline = KPipeline(lang_code='a')
text = '''
[Kokoro](/kˈOkəɹO/) is an open-weight TTS model with 82 million parameters. Despite its lightweight architecture, it delivers comparable quality to larger models while being significantly faster and more cost-efficient. With Apache-licensed weights, [Kokoro](/kˈOkəɹO/) can be deployed anywhere from production environments to personal projects.
'''
generator = pipeline(text, voice='af_heart')
for i, (gs, ps, audio) in enumerate(generator):
    print(i, gs, ps)
    display(Audio(data=audio, rate=24000, autoplay=i==0))
    sf.write(f'{i}.wav', audio, 24000)

Under the hood, kokoro uses misaki, a G2P library at https://github.com/hexgrad/misaki

Model Facts

Architecture:

• StyleTTS 2: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07691
• ISTFTNet: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02395
• Decoder only: no diffusion, no encoder release

Architected by: Li et al @ https://github.com/yl4579/StyleTTS2

Trained by: @rzvzn on Discord

Languages: Multiple

Model SHA256 Hash: 496dba118d1a58f5f3db2efc88dbdc216e0483fc89fe6e47ee1f2c53f18ad1e4

Training Details

Data: Kokoro was trained exclusively on permissive/non-copyrighted audio data and IPA phoneme labels. Examples of permissive/non-copyrighted audio include:

• Public domain audio
• Audio licensed under Apache, MIT, etc
• Synthetic audio^[1] generated by closed^[2] TTS models from large providers<br/> [1] https://copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf<br/> [2] No synthetic audio from open TTS models or "custom voice clones"

Total Dataset Size: A few hundred hours of audio

Total Training Cost: About $1000 for 1000 hours of A100 80GB vRAM

Creative Commons Attribution

The following CC BY audio was part of the dataset used to train Kokoro v1.0.

Acknowledgements

• 🛠️ @yl4579 for architecting StyleTTS 2.
• 🏆 @Pendrokar for adding Kokoro as a contender in the TTS Spaces Arena.
• 📊 Thank you to everyone who contributed synthetic training data.
• ❤️ Special thanks to all compute sponsors.
• 👾 Discord server: https://discord.gg/QuGxSWBfQy
• 🪽 Kokoro is a Japanese word that translates to "heart" or "spirit". It is also the name of an AI in the Terminator franchise.

<img src="https://static0.gamerantimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/terminator-zero-41-1.jpg" width="400" alt="kokoro" />