Tortoise TTS
The 2022 quality king of local TTS — now a historical reference.
About
Tortoise TTS was the 2022 breakthrough in local text-to-speech: multi-voice, remarkably expressive neural synthesis that set the quality bar for everything after. 14.9k stars, Apache-2.0. Historical entry: last push November 2024 (23 months), inference is famously slow (autoregressive + diffusion — minutes per sentence on CPU), and it's been decisively superseded by Kokoro, Fish Speech, XTTS v2, and Dia. Included for its historical importance; do not start new projects on it.
What it can do
- **Multi-voice**: clone-like voices from reference clips
- **Expressive**: prosody and emotion ahead of its 2022 peers
- **Apache-2.0**: permissive
- **Historical**: the quality baseline for modern neural TTS
Setup
```bash
git clone https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts
pip install -r requirements.txt
```
Expect very slow inference. Prefer Kokoro or Fish Speech for new work.
Prerequisites
Python 3.9+; NVIDIA GPU strongly recommended (very slow otherwise).
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 6/10
Scored 6/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: 14,884 GitHub stars (log-scaled vs catalog peers); last push 692d ago; 0 releases/12mo; 349 open issues; capped at 6: historical: stale and superseded. Manual review: 2022 quality king of local TTS, 14.9k stars; pushed Nov 2024 (23mo), famously slow inference, superseded by Kokoro/Fish Speech/XTTS/Dia — historical reference only. License: Apache-2.0.
★ 14,884 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.9/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 3.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 10.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 6.0/10
- · 14,884 GitHub stars (log-scaled vs catalog peers)
- · last push 692d ago; 0 releases/12mo; 349 open issues
- · manual review: 2022 quality king of local TTS, 14.9k stars; pushed Nov 2024 (23mo), famously slow inference, superseded by Kokoro/Fish Speech/XTTS/Dia — historical reference only
- · capped at 6: historical: stale and superseded
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.