[travisvn]

Chatterbox is fantastic.

I created an API wrapper that also makes installation easier (Dockerized as well) https://github.com/travisvn/chatterbox-tts-api/

Best voice cloning option available locally by far, in my experience.

[mistersquid]

> Chatterbox is fantastic.

> I created an API wrapper that also makes installation easier (Dockerized as well) https://github.com/travisvn/chatterbox-tts-ap

Gave your wrapper a try and, wow, I'm blown away by both Chatterbox TTS and your API wrapper.

Excuse the rudimentary level of what follows.

Was looking for a quick and dirty CLI incantation to specify a local text file instead of the inline `input` object, but couldn't figure it.

Pointers much appreciated.

[travisvn]

This API wrapper was initially made to support a particular use case where someone's running, say, Open WebUI or AnythingLLM or some other local LLM frontend.

A lot of these frontends have an option for using OpenAI's TTS API, and some of them allow you to specify the URL for that endpoint, allowing for "drop-in replacements" like this project.

So the speech generation endpoint in the API is designed to fill that niche. However, its usage is pretty basic and there are curl statements in the README for testing your setup.

Anyway, to get to your actual question, let me see if I can whip something up. I'll edit this comment with the command if I can swing it.

In the meantime, can I assume your local text files are actual `.txt` files?

[mistersquid]

This is way more of a response than I could have even hoped for. Thank you so much.

To answer your question, yes, my local text files are .txt files.

[travisvn]

Ok, here's a command that works.

I'm new to actually commenting on HN as opposed to just lurking, so I hope this formatting works..

  cat your_file.txt | python3 -c 'import sys, json; print(json.dumps({"input": sys.stdin.read()}))' | curl -X POST http://localhost:5123/v1/audio/speech \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d @- \
    --output speech.wav

Just replace the `your_file.txt` with.. well, you get it.

This'll hopefully handle any potential issues you'd have with quotes or other symbols breaking the JSON input.

Let me know how it goes!

Oh and you might want to change `python3` to `python` depending on your setup.

[mistersquid]

> Just replace the `your_file.txt` with.. well, you get it.

> This'll hopefully handle any potential issues you'd have with quotes or other symbols breaking the JSON input.

> Let me know how it goes!

Wow. I'm humbled and grateful.

I'll update once I'm done with work and back in front of my hone nachine.

[travisvn]

Hey — just pushed a big update that adds an (opt-in) frontend to test the API

For now, there's just a textarea for input (so you'll have to copy the `.txt` contents) — but it's a lot easier than trying to finagle into a `curl` request

Let me know if you have any issues!

[nitroedge]

Spent an hour trying to get it running with a RTX 50 series, no luck, tried with PyTorch 2.7.

Seems built for 2.6.

"chatterbox-tts 0.1.2 requires torch==2.6.0, but you have torch 2.7.0+cu128 which is incompatible. chatterbox-tts 0.1.2 requires torchaudio==2.6.0, but you have torchaudio 2.7.0+cu128 which is incompatible."

[venusenvy47]

Would this be usable on a PC without a GPU?

[travisvn]

It can definitely run on CPU — but I'm not sure if it can run on a machine without a GPU entirely.

To be honest, it uses a decently large amount of resources. If you had a GPU, you could expect about 4-5 gb memory usage. And given the optimizations for tensors on GPUs, I'm not sure how well things would work "CPU only".

If you try it, let me know. There are some "CPU" Docker builds in the repo you could look at for guidance.

If you want free TTS without using local resources, you could try edge-tts https://github.com/travisvn/openai-edge-tts