speak

Make your computer talk, right from the terminal. Powered by Supertonic 3 — everything runs locally on your CPU. No cloud, no API keys, works offline.

speak "hello world"
speak -v noah "a different voice"
speak "مرحبا بالعالم"                # language detected automatically
speak -o clip.wav "or save to a file"
speak < article.txt                  # long reads start speaking instantly
ollama run llama3 "tell a story" | speak --live   # voice for your LLM

Install

uv tool install speak-cli

No other setup: everything is prebuilt wheels, and the voice models (~400 MB) download automatically the first time you speak. say also works as an alias.

Voices

Ten voices, picked by name (speak --list-voices):

Prefer one? Make it stick: speak --set-default noah

Options

Sprinkle in expression tags for natural delivery: speak "well <laugh> that was funny" (also <breath>, <sigh>, …).

Good to know

• Speech streams: long texts start playing in about a second while the rest is still being synthesized — no waiting, no length limit.
• The first call starts a small background service that keeps the model warm — repeat calls speak in under a second. It shuts itself down after 15 idle minutes; speak --stop ends it manually.
• Auto-detection recognizes Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Greek, and Hindi by their alphabets; other Latin-script languages need a hint, e.g. --lang fr.

Licenses

CLI: MIT · Supertonic 3 model weights: OpenRAIL-M