Piper
Fast local neural text-to-speech used by Home Assistant and NVDA, with CLI, web server, Python and C/C++ APIs.
- License
- GPL-3.0
- Platforms
- Linux, Windows, macOS, CLI, Docker
- Own API keys
- No
- Checked
- 2026-09-24
Piper alternatives
Offline push-to-talk dictation: hold a hotkey, speak, and the text is pasted into any app; optional LLM cleanup via an OpenAI-compatible API.
OpenAI's multilingual speech recognition and translation models, from tiny to large-v3 and turbo, with a Python CLI.
CTranslate2 reimplementation of Whisper, up to 4x faster with less memory and 8-bit quantization.
Dependency-free C/C++ port of Whisper with CUDA, Vulkan, Metal, quantization, VAD and an HTTP server.
Desktop app to transcribe and translate audio and video offline with Whisper or any OpenAI-compatible API.
Lightweight open-weight 82M-parameter text-to-speech model with 54 voices in 8 languages, fast even on CPU.
FAQ
Is Piper free?
Free and runs fully offline (GPL-3.0); the project is currently looking for maintainers.
Does Piper work with free models?
It uses the vendor's own models; connecting third-party free APIs is not supported or not documented.
What license does Piper use?
GPL-3.0. The source code is open.