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Text to Speech

Generate natural-sounding speech from text, ready to play back in your game.

var tts = await NobodyWhoTextToSpeech.create("hf://NobodyWho/Kokoro-82M", {
    "voice": "bf_emma",   # Voice to use from the model.
    "language": "en-gb",  # Language code for the input text.
})

# Generate WAV bytes for this line.
var wav: PackedByteArray = await tts.synthesize("Hello from NobodyWho!")

# Play it through an AudioStreamPlayer.
var audio := AudioStreamWAV.load_from_buffer(wav)
$AudioStreamPlayer.stream = audio
$AudioStreamPlayer.play()

synthesize resolves to a complete WAV container (16-bit PCM). To save it to disk instead, use FileAccess.open and store_buffer(wav).

Models and sources​

NobodyWho supports three speech synthesis architectures, all in ONNX format:

The source can be a Hugging Face repo (hf://owner/repo) as shown above, or a local directory laid out the same way as that repo. See Local model folder format and Architecture for setup details.

Kokoro​

For Kokoro, set voice and language together. They must agree with the model's available voices.

var tts = await NobodyWhoTextToSpeech.create("hf://NobodyWho/Kokoro-82M", {
    "voice": "bf_emma",
    "language": "en-gb",
})

Optional settings include:

  • voice: voice to use from the model, e.g. bf_emma. See the Kokoro voices folder for the full list. Defaults to bf_emma.
  • language: input language code. Supported values are listed on the Kokoro model page. Defaults to en-gb.
  • speed: speech speed multiplier. 1.0 is normal speed, lower values are slower, higher values are faster. Defaults to 1.0.

Supertonic​

For Supertonic, you can start with the default voice and language, or set them explicitly.

var tts = await NobodyWhoTextToSpeech.create("hf://Supertone/supertonic-3", {
    "language": "en",
})

Optional settings include:

  • voice: voice style. Supported values are M1 to M5 and F1 to F5. Defaults to M1.
  • language: input language code. See the Supertonic model page for the full list. Defaults to en.
  • speed: speech speed multiplier. 1.0 is normal speed. Defaults to 1.05.
  • steps: denoising steps. Higher values can improve quality but are slower. Lower values are faster but can sound rougher. Must be greater than 0; defaults to 8.
  • silence_duration: seconds of silence between long text chunks. Higher values add longer pauses. Must be 0 or higher; defaults to 0.3.

Pocket TTS​

For Pocket TTS, start with the default voice and language, or set them explicitly.

var tts = await NobodyWhoTextToSpeech.create("hf://KevinAHM/pocket-tts-onnx", {
    "voice": "alba",
    "language": "english_2026-04",
    "huggingface_token": "hf_...", # Alternative: set the HF_TOKEN environment variable.
})

Optional settings include:

  • voice: built-in voice name. See the Pocket TTS voice catalogue. Defaults to alba.
  • language: language bundle name. See the available language bundles. Defaults to english_2026-04.
  • steps: quality steps. Higher values are slower. Defaults to 1.
  • precision: "int8" for faster loading or "fp32" for higher quality. Defaults to "int8".
  • temperature: controls how varied the speech sounds. Defaults to 0.7.

Pocket TTS voice states are gated in kyutai/pocket-tts. Accept its terms, then pass a Hugging Face access token with huggingface_token, or alternatively set the HF_TOKEN environment variable.

Architecture​

architecture is the TextToSpeech model family behind a source. In most cases, you do not need to set it because NobodyWho can infer it by looking for "kokoro", "pocket-tts", or "supertonic" in the source string.

Set architecture when you use a local directory or a custom source that NobodyWho cannot recognize:

var tts = await NobodyWhoTextToSpeech.create("./my-kokoro-folder", {
    "architecture": "kokoro",
})

Supported architecture values are kokoro, pocket-tts, and supertonic.

GPU​

TextToSpeech uses GPU acceleration by default when available. Disable it with device:

var tts = await NobodyWhoTextToSpeech.create("hf://NobodyWho/Kokoro-82M", {
    "device": "cpu",
})

Local model folder format​

A local source directory mirrors the layout of the corresponding Hugging Face repo. For Kokoro that means:

my-kokoro-folder/
├── model.onnx
├── config.json
└── voices/
    ├── bf_emma.safetensors
    └── ...

Bundling the folder with your game (e.g. under res://) makes speech synthesis fully offline.