LoudKit releases local TTS model with voice cloning and 10-language support

A developer who spent months building a reading app has released LoudKit, a local text-to-speech system with voice cloning, support for 10 languages and SDKs for Python, Swift, Go, Rust and TypeScript. Announcing it on r/LocalLLaMA, the developer wrote that the model was built to run on edge hardware and tested on an iPhone 14 Pro. Code and model weights are published under Apache 2.0.

The project grew out of frustration with the local options already available. The developer had tried kokoro, kitten and pocket, and writes that all three produced natural speech but each had problems when listening for longer stretches. Last month the developer set out to build a model that could run on a phone. The starting point was Chatterbox, the base model the developer says LoudKit was optimized from.

Two variants ship. The post names the first as loudr-1; a second is mentioned without a name in the text available. The developer describes the model as small and fast enough for edge use, rates the output as similar to Chatterbox by ear, and lists voice cloning and the 10-language coverage as the main capabilities. One piece is absent from this release: the emotion axis with tags, which the developer says is being worked on now.

Plumbing for five language targets accounts for much of the work. The developer wrote that the contract across the adapters is to produce the same speech tokens in every one, so that a voice does not sound good in Python and poor in TypeScript. The stated motivation is an earlier port where the developer lost roughly a week parsing a single TTS tokenizer from Python to Swift, then dealt with crashes and memory leaks. Backend output is close but not identical: the post says audio samples can differ slightly and that file metadata such as timestamps can differ too.

The post carries no latency, memory or model-size figures and no side-by-side measurement against Chatterbox or the other models it names. Speed, size and quality are the developer's own characterizations, offered as a listening comparison rather than a benchmark. The 10 languages are not enumerated in the text available, and no independent test of the release accompanies it.

LoudKit enters a local speech field where the models the developer considered, kokoro, kitten, pocket and Chatterbox, are the reference points for offline apps. The developer's complaint about those tools concerns their behavior over long listening sessions rather than their naturalness, a gap LoudKit is pitched at closing. The developer says the next addition is the emotion axis with tags.

What remains open is the release itself. The available text does not include repository or download details, benchmarks, or the language list, and the emotion tags have no stated timeline. Until those appear, the comparison that exists is the developer's own listening test against Chatterbox.