Hi all, I’d like to share a project and ask for feedback: small single-voice TTS models distilled from Kokoro-82M, in English and Italian.
Try it: Teacher in the Loop - a Hugging Face Space by MithrilMan It runs entirely in your browser (ONNX Runtime Web, eSpeak NG compiled to WebAssembly). The Listen section plays the teacher, Paradee’s released decoder, the published recipe and mine on the same held-out sentences.
What it is
af_heart (English), if_sara and im_nicola (Italian)pip install teacher-in-the-loop, then titl --voice if_sara "Buongiorno a tutti." -o out.wav
Why it exists
It’s a follow-up to Paradee. Re-running Paradee’s published training scripts, my decoders ended at UTMOS 1.94 and 2.89, against 4.37 for the released one. The target of the first decoder stage is a 1.6 s crop of a teacher render of the whole sentence. Kokoro’s decoder normalizes over the whole utterance and draws a random excitation, so that target can’t be predicted from the crop. Putting the frozen teacher in the loop fixes it without changing the architecture: the teacher renders each crop with the student’s excitation, and the student also matches the teacher’s iSTFT head.