ovos-tts-plugin-audio8

Proof of concept: experimental, not for production, may be abandoned. The API can change.

OVOS TTS plugin for Audio8 TTS Realistic 0.6B. It clones a voice from one short reference clip. The plugin replaces the model's decode loop with a faster one, so it runs faster than real time on an NVIDIA GPU or an Apple Silicon Mac.

Hardware: read this first

This plugin needs a GPU. It is not for a Raspberry Pi or other small single-board computers.

RTF is synthesis time divided by audio length. A value below 1.0 is faster than real time. At RTF 0.27, a 5-second sentence takes about 1.4 s to make.

If your voice assistant runs on small hardware, run this plugin on a machine that has a GPU, behind ovos-tts-server, and point your assistant at that server.

Install

pip install ovos-tts-plugin-audio8
# For streaming, add the built-in player:
pip install "ovos-tts-plugin-audio8[player]"

• On Linux, pip installs the CUDA build of PyTorch by default.
• On macOS, the default PyTorch build includes MPS support.
• The first start downloads about 2.6 GB of model files from Hugging Face.

Configure

"tts": {
  "module": "ovos-tts-plugin-audio8",
  "ovos-tts-plugin-audio8": {
    "voice": "seven",
    "voices": {
      "seven": {
        "reference_audio": "/home/ovos/voices/regeneration_cycle.wav",
        "reference_text": "Oh six hundred hours, regeneration cycle complete."
      }
    }
  }
}

The defaults select the fastest settings for your hardware. You must set only voice and voices.

Voice cloning

• reference_text must be the exact words in the clip. Write numbers the way the speaker says them ("oh six hundred", not "0600"). If the text does not match, the voice is less stable.
• Use a clean clip of 3 to 10 seconds. A 44.1 kHz mono WAV prevents resampling: ffmpeg -i clip.mp3 -ac 1 -ar 44100 clip.wav.
• To get the transcript, you can use Whisper. Tell it to write numbers as words.
• The plugin encodes each reference clip one time and keeps the codes in memory.
• The reference, its transcript and the sentence share a 2,048-frame context. Use short references.
• Each take is sampled, so takes of the same sentence are different. A lower temperature gives takes that are more alike.
• The model copies the loudness of the clip. The plugin measures each clip and applies one gain per voice, so all voices play at about the same level (within ~4 dB in tests; a quiet clip and a loud clip were 16 dB apart before).

Only clone a voice that you have the right to use.

Streaming

The plugin is an OVOS StreamingTTS. Set "enable_streaming": true, and ovos-audio starts to play each sentence before the plugin has finished generating it.

• The built-in player (the player extra) plays the stream through sounddevice. When a chunk is late, it plays silence and then continues. It does not discard audio.
• Without the extra, streaming needs ffplay, paplay or aplay on the device. The plugin starts ffplay with low-latency flags; the default flags wait for about 2 s of audio before they play. When ffplay runs out of audio, it discards some audio, so a late chunk can cause a short glitch.
• Streamed audio is 44.1 kHz, the codec rate. The sample_rate setting does not apply.
• Each chunk decodes the sentence again from its first frame. The codec looks back over the whole sentence, so this is the only exact way to decode in chunks. A scheduler sends each chunk just before the player would run out, and never a chunk too small to pay for its own decode. The first chunk is about 1.4 s of audio, so playback starts with a lead.
• Long sentences (more than 100 characters) are split at commas into pieces of 40 to 100 characters, so that each decode stays short. Without streaming, sentences are not split.
• When the wake word is heard, the plugin reads the whole model once, in the background. This removes a ~2 s delay on the first reply after the device has been idle.
• Mouth movement: the model gives no phoneme timing, so the plugin sends visemes from the audio level in 40 ms steps (closed, half open, round, wide). With streaming, each chunk's visemes go out when that chunk starts to play. Without streaming, the visemes travel with the WAV and are kept in the OVOS cache.
• Streaming works only when the plugin runs inside ovos-audio. The Neon Hub (neon-audio) and ovos-tts-server 1.15 always request complete files.

Performance

Steady RTF for each decoder value. The test used 8 sentences and a cloned voice.

auto selects cuda_graph on CUDA and compile on other devices. If torch.compile fails, the plugin logs the error and uses eager.

Why it is faster

The model's own generate() is limited by per-operation overhead, not by computation. Each audio frame runs about 11 small forward passes in sequence: one pass of the 24-layer model, then 10 steps of a 4-layer codebook model. On a 3090, GPU use stays near 30%. On MPS, the codebook loop uses about two thirds of each frame.

frame_decoder.py runs each frame on fixed buffers:

• It does not sync with the host on each frame. It checks for end of speech every 8 frames.
• It does not create tensors from Python values inside the loop.
• It computes logits and samples only over the 4,096 semantic tokens and EOS. The model masks all other tokens before sampling, so the sampled distribution does not change.

Then it runs the frame in one of three ways:

• cuda_graph records one full frame as a CUDA graph and replays it.
• compile fuses the frame with torch.compile.
• eager runs it as normal PyTorch.

One difference from upstream: the first frame's token enters the repetition-aware sampling window. Upstream skips it.

Security

The model loads custom Python code from Hugging Face (trust_remote_code=True). The plugin pins revision to a reviewed commit. frame_decoder.py also calls private methods of that code. Before you change revision, read the *.py files at the new commit, then run scripts/bench_decoder.py and listen to the output.

Development

uv sync
uv run pytest
uv run ruff check .

The tests build a small model with random weights from the pinned upstream code. They download the config and code, but not the weights.

To render sample sentences with your own reference clip, put it at voices/regeneration_cycle.wav and run:

uv run python scripts/generate_samples.py
uv run python scripts/bench_decoder.py --device mps --modes model,eager,compile

Git ignores voices/*.wav and samples/, because reference clips can be copyrighted audio.

License

Apache-2.0. The Audio8 model is Apache-2.0, by Edge0.