Coqui TTS
Open-source AI text-to-speech
Coqui TTS is an open-source deep learning toolkit for text-to-speech synthesis, offering pretrained models in over 1,100 languages and tools for training or fine-tuning custom voices. Originally developed by Coqui AI, the framework continues to thrive as a community-maintained project after the company's closure in late 2025, making advanced speech generation freely accessible to developers and researchers worldwide.
Key Capabilities
Coqui TTS supports voice cloning from as little as 3–10 seconds of reference audio, enabling the creation of realistic digital voice replicas. The XTTS v2 model delivers multilingual speech synthesis across 17 languages with cross-language voice transfer, allowing a voice captured in one language to speak naturally in another. The toolkit includes emotion and style transfer, multiple TTS architectures (Tacotron2, VITS, Glow-TTS), and dataset utilities for training custom models from scratch.
Who Should Use Coqui TTS
Coqui TTS is ideal for developers building voice-enabled applications, researchers exploring speech synthesis, accessibility advocates creating tools for visually impaired users, game developers needing character voices, and content creators seeking multilingual narration without expensive studio recording.
Getting Started
Install Coqui TTS via pip with pip install TTS and access pretrained models directly from the command line or Python API. The GitHub repository provides extensive documentation, sample scripts, and community-maintained model checkpoints. Start with the XTTS v2 model for the highest quality multilingual output.
Pricing & Accessibility: Coqui TTS is completely free and open source under the MPL-2.0 license. All models and code are available on GitHub and Hugging Face at no cost. Self-hosting is required as the commercial SaaS platform is no longer available.
Why Consider Coqui TTS: For teams that need full control over their text-to-speech pipeline without recurring API costs, Coqui TTS offers unmatched flexibility with support for 1,100+ languages, voice cloning, and the ability to fine-tune models on proprietary data—all without vendor lock-in.
Pros
- Completely free and open source with no usage limits
- Supports 1,100+ languages with pretrained models
- Voice cloning from just 3–10 seconds of audio
- Full control over model training and fine-tuning
- Active community maintaining and improving the codebase
Cons
- Requires technical expertise to set up and run
- No commercial support or hosted API since company closure
- GPU hardware needed for training and real-time inference
Who is this for?
Voice-enabled applications, audiobook narration, accessibility tools, game character dialogue, multilingual content creation, research in speech synthesis, virtual assistants, language learning platforms
Frequently Asked Questions about Coqui TTS
Is Coqui TTS still maintained after the company shut down?
Yes. While Coqui AI closed in late 2025, the open-source project continues to be maintained by the community on GitHub and through forks like the Idiap fork. All pretrained models remain available on Hugging Face.
What hardware do I need to run Coqui TTS?
For inference with pretrained models, a modern CPU works for basic use, but a CUDA-compatible GPU is recommended for real-time performance. Training new models requires a GPU with at least 8GB VRAM.
How does voice cloning work in Coqui TTS?
The XTTS v2 model can clone a voice from 3–10 seconds of reference audio. You provide a short audio clip of the target voice, and the model learns to generate new speech that sounds like that speaker in any of the supported languages.
Pricing
discontinued
$0
Free tier: Unlimited - fully open source
Details
APINo
Open SourceYes
Languages1,100+ languages
Learning CurveSteep
Integrations
Python APIcommand-line interfaceHugging Face
