Text-to-speech · TTS
Piper
Open-weight, efficient TTS — multilingual and CPU-friendly.
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 2.00 per million characters. The price floor of the catalog — roughly half of AWS Polly Standard ($4/M) and well under every neural-voice tier.
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.
Continue in the ScaLabs Cloud Console
We'll create your account and email you a 6-digit sign-in code. Finish the request inside the console.