tortoise-tts

tortoise-tts is a speech (TTS/STT) tool - A multi-voice TTS system trained with an emphasis on quality.

Overview

1. Strong multi-voice capabilities. 2. Highly realistic prosody and intonation.

This repo contains all the code needed to run Tortoise TTS in inference mode.

A live demo is hosted on Hugging Face Spaces. If you'd like to avoid a queue, please duplicate the Space and add a GPU. Please note that CPU-only spaces do not work for this demo.

I'm naming my speech-related repos after Mojave desert flora and fauna. Tortoise is a bit tongue in cheek: this model is insanely slow. It leverages both an autoregressive decoder and a diffusion decoder; both known for their low sampling rates. On a K80, expect to generate a medium sized sentence every 2 minutes.

A cool application of Tortoise + GPT-3 (not affiliated with this repository): https://twitter.com/lexman_ai. Unfortunately, this project seems no longer to be active.

If you want to use this on your own computer, you must have an NVIDIA GPU.

First, install miniconda: https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html

This will: 1. create conda environment with minimal dependencies specified 1. activate the environment 1. install pytorch with the command provided here: https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/ 1. clone tortoise-tts 1. change the current directory to tortoise-tts 1. run tortoise python setup install script

tortoise-tts is open-source, written primarily in Jupyter Notebook, with 14,886 GitHub stars under the Apache 2.0 license. It was last updated on 2024-11-19.

Key capabilities

From the project's documentation:

• Hugging Face, who wrote the GPT model and the generate API used by Tortoise, and who hosts the model weights.
• Jang et al who developed and open-sourced univnet, the vocoder this repo uses.
• Kim and Jung who implemented univnet pytorch model.
• lucidrains who writes awesome open source pytorch models, many of which are used here.

Install

A quick way to get started (always check the official docs for the latest):

pip install tortoise-tts

How it fits a local-AI stack

tortoise-tts runs on your own hardware, so pair it with a model and a GPU sized to your needs. Use the VRAM calculator to pick a model that fits your card, and see what you can run for hardware guidance. Related speech (TTS/STT) tools in the directory:

• "cactus"
• "claude-code-local"
• "dograh"
• "DreamServer"

Sources

• Source code & docs: neonbjb/tortoise-tts

Stats from GitHub, 2026-10-17.