Speech and transcription

Two playground tabs cover audio.

Speech (TTS) is a small studio: type text on the left, pick a voice, and each generation becomes a waveform card in the clip library on the right. Cards can be played, edited (which regenerates), regenerated, downloaded (WAV), or deleted; a volume slider and Auto-play toggle sit pinned at the bottom, and clips are saved per user as threads.

How voices work depends on the model kind (auto-detected):

• Base model - one default voice, plus voice cloning: click Clone a voice and either read the on-screen passage aloud (live mic) or upload a WAV/MP3 sample; an optional reference transcript improves the clone. Cloned voices are saved and reusable, and can be deleted.
• Custom-voice model - ships its own set of named speakers; pick one from the list (no default).
• Voice-design model - no fixed speakers. Instead you pick a style preset (a written description like "a calm elderly man with a slight rasp"). Several presets ship built-in, and you can Design a voice to save your own.

Use the refresh button by the voice list to reload the voices a model actually offers.

Transcription (STT) - upload an audio file and get the transcript from a speech-recognition model.

Both use the same on-demand loading as every other model - the first request loads the model.

Pronunciation: TTS quality depends on how the model turns text into sounds. Kokoro builds ship in two flavours - one that phonemizes with espeak-ng and one with a smaller rule set baked into the model file (usually marked no_espeak). The baked-in one mangles a whole class of everyday words ("messages" comes out as "messi"), so prefer the espeak build if you have the choice. It also matters for non-English voices: Kokoro ships packs for British English, Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Mandarin, and only the espeak build can phonemize them - the baked-in rule set is English-only, so those voices read foreign text with an English accent.

Kokoro takes no emotion or pause markup. SSML tags, <break>, or bracketed stage directions are not commands to it - they get read out loud as words. Punctuation is the only control you have: commas and semicolons produce a real pause, and sentence-ending marks split the text into separate spoken chunks. For expressive speech you need a model built for it (a voice-design or style-prompt model) rather than markup.

This page is generated from the help wiki that ships inside the app: the same text you get from the Help button, and the same text the playground assistant searches. Corrections go to wiki_articles.json.