How to run text-to-speech AI locally (Nov 2026): best open models and their licenses

Can you run text-to-speech AI locally?

Yes. For narration with preset voices, Kokoro-82M (Apache 2.0) and Piper (GPL-3.0) run on ordinary computers. For voice cloning on a normal PC, Chatterbox Multilingual V3 (MIT, 23 languages) and Kitten-TTS 2 (runs on CPU, 16 languages) are the practical picks. The highest-rated open model, Fish Audio Drama 3, is a 35B-parameter model that its makers benchmarked on data-center GPUs: run it on a rented card, not a laptop.

The second question is the license. Several of the best-sounding open models do not allow commercial use, or allow it only below a revenue cap. We read each model card on November 1, 2026; the table below says what each one permits.

Which model for which job

The license column is a summary of each model card on Nov 1, 2026, not legal advice. Read the license file before you ship anything.

How good are they? The leaderboard

Artificial Analysis runs a blind listening arena for TTS. On Nov 1, 2026 its leaderboard listed 19 open-weights models among 100. The open-weights ranking, by Elo score:

The top overall model was a closed one, ElevenLabs' Eleven v4 Turbo, at 1336. Kitten-TTS 2 and OmniVoice were not on the leaderboard. Rank #2 was a preview of Drama 3; ranks 4 and 6 to 8 are models we have not covered here.

That lines up with what people reported in r/LocalLLaMA's October thread on the best open-source TTS (thread): replies named Fish Audio Drama 3, Breeze-TTS 2, Chatterbox V3 and Fish Audio S2 Pro. Kokoro is the surprise in the table: an 82M-parameter model that ranks inside the open-weights top ten.

Narration vs voice cloning: pick your tool

Narration means reading text in a good preset voice: audiobooks, video voiceover, accessibility. Kokoro-82M is the standout here: the model card lists 54 voices across 8 languages for v1.0 (January 2025) and Apache 2.0 weights, so commercial use is fine. It does not clone voices. Piper, now maintained by the Open Home Foundation as piper1-gpl, describes itself as "a fast and local neural text-to-speech engine"; its code is GPL-3.0.

Voice cloning means reproducing a specific voice from a sample. For a normal PC:

• Chatterbox Multilingual V3 (Resemble AI) is a 500M-parameter model covering 23 languages under the MIT license. Resemble's model card says it is "consistently preferred" over closed systems including ElevenLabs in side-by-side evaluations, citing a Podonos report. Every file it generates includes Resemble's Perth watermark, which the repo says survives MP3 compression. The English-only Chatterbox-Nano (110M) is described as "3x faster than realtime on 8 CPU cores".
• Kitten-TTS 2 (KittenML) is a 1.7B speech model packed to about 954 MB, with a 1.58-bit ternary body. It runs on CPU, clones from "5-30 seconds of a single speaker", ships 115 voices in 16 languages, and adds beta emotion tags. Its Stellon Labs Community License is free for commercial use until you pass $1,000,000 in annual revenue or total funding. The r/LocalLLaMA release thread (thread) is where it got noticed.

Fish Audio Drama 3 is the quality leader and handles up to 16 speakers in one script, with cloning from a short clip. It is a mixture-of-experts model with 35B total and 3B active parameters, Fish Audio's benchmarks were run on NVIDIA H200 GPUs, and the card gives no minimum VRAM. Its Fish Audio Community License allows commercial use only while annual revenue is under $500,000 and grants no right to offer it as a hosted service.

How to get started

For narration, start with Kokoro or Piper. Both install with Python packages and run on modest machines; Kokoro's README adds a one-line setting for GPU acceleration on Apple Silicon Macs.

For voice cloning on a PC without a big GPU, try Kitten-TTS 2 (it auto-detects the device and runs on CPU; the card recommends its llama.cpp port for the fastest CPU speed) or Chatterbox. Feed either a clean sample of one speaker. Breeze-TTS 2 needs Linux and an NVIDIA GPU: about 7.7 GiB in its default mode, 12 GB minimum recommended, and a 24 GB card for its fast mode.

For Fish Audio Drama 3, the model card's run instructions use server frameworks (SGLang-Omni or vLLM-Omni), which is a sign of where it belongs: a large GPU, local or rented. Size the card before you rent it with our VRAM calculator, and see whether renting or buying makes sense in rent vs buy.

Because all of this runs locally, your text and voice samples stay on your computer. Pair local TTS with local speech-to-text (Whisper) and you have a private voice pipeline: transcribe with Whisper, speak with Kokoro.

Local TTS is free to run and private: Kokoro for narration, Chatterbox or Kitten-TTS 2 for cloning on a normal PC, and Fish Audio Drama 3 on a big GPU when quality matters most and your revenue is under its cap. Combine it with local Whisper transcription for a full offline voice pipeline, and see the best free local models for the text side.