Text-to-speech · TTS
Piper
Open-weight, efficient TTS — multilingual, CPU-friendly, cheapest in the catalog.
Piper is the cheapest voice in our catalog. Originally built for Home Assistant and edge devices, it is small, efficient, and supports a broad multilingual voice catalog. Quality is below Chatterbox and Kokoro for English, but acceptable, and the language coverage is wider.
When to pick it
- You need voice in a language Chatterbox or Kokoro does not cover
- Volume is high enough that cost-per-character dominates
- The output is going to be heard once and discarded (notifications, one-off briefings)
When to pick something else
- Voice cloning → Chatterbox or Qwen3-TTS
- Low-latency streaming chat → Kokoro or Qwen3-TTS
- Audiobook-quality narration → Chatterbox
Pricing
EUR 0.50 per million characters. The price floor of the catalog.
Limits
Same operational limits as the other TTS models. Voice catalog browseable through the API; specific voice availability per language varies.
Best for
- High-volume notification pipelines where cost per minute matters
- Multilingual voice output across many smaller languages
- Background voice generation in non-real-time pipelines
- Acceptable-quality voice at the floor of the pricing curve
Upstream source: github.com/rhasspy/piper
Request Piper access
Get an API key.
Straight pay-per-use against the published rate. No deposit, no minimums. Tell us what you're building and we'll send your API key and endpoint URL within one working day.