Piper (text to speech)
- Software
- Humanoids and robot learning
- Library
Piper is a fast, local neural text-to-speech engine that uses espeak-ng for phonemization. It can be installed with pip as piper-tts.
Made by Open Home Foundation (Voice).
Source on GitHub: github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl (opens in a new tab). Facts read at commit 40ecf92 (opens in a new tab).
Licenses
- Code
- GPL-3.0-only (opens in a new tab)
Read by Robotheca from COPYING (opens in a new tab) (GPL-3.0-only) at commit 40ecf92 (opens in a new tab), on 16 Oct 2026.
- Commercial use
- Yes
Copyleft: Modified source must be published.
What it does
- Converts text to speech locally using neural models.
- Uses espeak-ng to turn text into phonemes before synthesis.
- Offers a command-line interface, a web server, and a Python API.
- Provides a C/C++ API through libpiper for embedding in other software.
- Includes documentation for training new voices and for building manually.
- Has bindings for Java, in addition to Python and C/C++.
Written by Robotheca from the project's README (opens in a new tab) at commit 40ecf92.
Getting started
- Difficulty
- Beginner
- How to start
- The project's README (opens in a new tab)
Maintenance
- Status
- Active: a commit in the last 90 days
- Newest commit
- 15 Oct 2026 on main
- Latest release
- v1.8.0 (4 Sept 2026)
Checked on GitHub on 16 Oct 2026.
Links
Robots that can run it
No robot on Robotheca is linked to it yet. Links come from a robot's robot.yaml, from its dependency files read as text, or from Robotheca's editors.
Robotheca lists software as a reference: nothing is hosted or run here, and every fact links to where it was read.