vocal-ai 0.3.6

Ollama-style Voice Model Management - Self-hosted OpenAI-compatible Speech AI

Vocal

Ollama for Voice Models — Self-hosted Speech AI Platform

Vocal manages STT (Speech-to-Text) and TTS (Text-to-Speech) models the way Ollama manages LLMs. It provides an OpenAI-compatible REST API, a Python SDK, and a CLI — with model download, caching, and multi-backend support built in.

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Quick Start

# Run without installing
uvx --from vocal-ai vocal serve

# Or install permanently
pip install vocal-ai
vocal serve

Interactive API docs are at http://localhost:8000/docs.

# Pull a model and transcribe
vocal models pull Systran/faster-whisper-tiny
vocal transcribe your_audio.wav

# Text-to-speech (built-in, no download)
vocal speak "Hello, world!"

# Real-time microphone transcription
vocal listen

# Full voice agent (STT → LLM → TTS)
vocal chat    # requires Ollama running locally

Optional backends (base install already includes torch + faster-whisper + transformers + silero-vad):

Extra	What you get	Install
kokoro	Kokoro-82M neural TTS, #1 on TTS Arena	pip install "vocal-ai[kokoro]"
piper	Piper offline TTS, fast, multilingual	pip install "vocal-ai[piper]"
qwen3-tts	Qwen3-TTS voice cloning (CUDA required)	pip install "vocal-ai[qwen3-tts]"
whisperx	WhisperX — word-level timestamps + diarization	pip install "vocal-ai[whisperx]"
nemo	NVIDIA NeMo STT (Parakeet-TDT, Canary-Qwen)	pip install "vocal-ai[nemo]"
chatterbox	Chatterbox voice cloning TTS	pip install "vocal-ai[chatterbox]"

Missing a backend? The error message will tell you exactly which command to run.

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Features

• OpenAI-compatible — /v1/audio/transcriptions, /v1/audio/speech, /v1/realtime
• Ollama-style model management — pull, list, delete models from the CLI or API
• Auto-generated SDK — typed Python client generated from the live OpenAPI spec
• Streaming TTS — first audio bytes before full synthesis completes
• WebSocket ASR — ~200 ms latency with server-side VAD
• Voice agent — full STT → LLM → TTS loop, OpenAI Realtime protocol compatible
• Voice selection — list and select voices per model
• Voice cloning — clone a voice from a 3–30 s reference recording
• Cross-platform — Windows, macOS, Linux (WSL supported)
• GPU acceleration — automatic CUDA detection with VRAM optimization

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Documentation

Getting Started	Install, first transcription, platform notes
Available Models	STT/TTS catalog, hardware guide
CLI Reference	All commands with options
Configuration	Environment variables, .env
Contributing	Dev setup, PR workflow
Architecture	Package structure, adapter pattern
Adding Models	New STT/TTS backends
Testing	Test tiers, CI, cross-platform
Release Process	Version bump, PyPI publish

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API Overview

Speech-to-Text (OpenAI-compatible)

curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/v1/audio/transcriptions \
  -F "file=@audio.mp3" \
  -F "model=Systran/faster-whisper-tiny"

Text-to-Speech (OpenAI-compatible)

curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/v1/audio/speech \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"pyttsx3","input":"Hello, world!","response_format":"wav"}' \
  --output speech.wav

Voice Cloning

curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/v1/audio/clone \
  -F "text=Synthesize in my voice." \
  -F "reference_audio=@speaker.wav" \
  --output clone.wav

Model Management (Ollama-style)

curl http://localhost:8000/v1/models               # list
curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/v1/models/Systran/faster-whisper-tiny/download
curl -X DELETE http://localhost:8000/v1/models/Systran/faster-whisper-tiny

SDK

from vocal_sdk import VocalClient
from vocal_sdk.api.audio import text_to_speech_v1_audio_speech_post
from vocal_sdk.models import TTSRequest

client = VocalClient(base_url="http://localhost:8000")
audio = text_to_speech_v1_audio_speech_post.sync(
    client=client,
    body=TTSRequest(model="pyttsx3", input="Hello from the SDK."),
)
open("output.wav", "wb").write(audio)

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Cross-Platform

Platform	TTS Engine	Notes
Windows	SAPI5 (pyttsx3)	Built-in, no extra install
macOS	NSSpeechSynthesizer	Built-in, no extra install
Linux / WSL	espeak-ng (pyttsx3)	sudo apt install espeak-ng ffmpeg

All audio formats (mp3, wav, opus, aac, flac, pcm) work on all platforms via ffmpeg.

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Contributing

git clone https://github.com/niradler/vocal.git
cd vocal
make install
make lint && make test

See docs/developer/contributing.md for the full workflow.

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License

Server Side Public License (SSPL-1.0) — free to use and self-host. If you offer Vocal as a managed service to third parties, you must open-source your full service stack under the same license.

Built with FastAPI, faster-whisper, HuggingFace Hub, and uv.