# Train your own custom Tiny TTS model from scratch overnight on consumer hardware

> Source: <https://github.com/franciscocarloserra/ttslibre>
> Published: 2026-09-07 09:20:50+00:00

**Let's train the FOSS Supertonic / Kokoro successor.**

A text-to-speech model under 100M parameters that answers instantly on a laptop CPU, sounds at least as good as Supertonic 3 and more expressive, and ships with everything needed to reproduce it.

## simplescreenrecorder-2026-09-07_06.04.17.mp4

**Current checkpoint: v0.1.2** (English PoC, 19.8M params, 177 h LibriTTS-R, whole-val Whisper WER 0.23): [FranciscoCarlosErra/ttslibre-poc-en](https://huggingface.co/FranciscoCarlosErra/ttslibre-poc-en) — cold-start and in-memory inference instructions in the model card. Rough, as promised in the plan.

|  | Kokoro-82M | Supertonic 3 | **TTSLibre** | 
|---|---|---|---|
| Weights | Apache 2.0 | OpenRAIL-M, use restrictions | **CC0, public domain** | 
| Training code | not released | not released | **MIT, in this repo** | 
| Training data | undisclosed, partly synthetic from closed TTS | undisclosed | **CC0, published with per-clip provenance** | 
| Voice tool | none official | none official | **MIT, style vector editor** | 
| Params | 82M | ~99M | **under 100M** | 
| Runs on | CPU | CPU | **CPU, and GPU under 1 GB** | 

Four artifacts, all free, all reproducible: **code, data, weights, voice tool.** You can retrain it, fine-tune it, embed it in a product, or fork the dataset, without asking anyone. That is the whole proposition.

The voice tool already exists for the two reference models. Both were built by reverse-engineering their style spaces without any training code, and both run on CPU.

- [supertonic-voicelab](https://github.com/franciscocarloserra/supertonic-voicelab) : 40 new voice packs for Supertonic 3, sliders with measured safe ranges.
- [kokoro-voicelab](https://github.com/franciscocarloserra/kokoro-voicelab) : same for Kokoro-82M, plus 257 per-phoneme knobs.

What those tools could not do is the reason this project exists: they hit the ceiling of what you can do to a model without its training recipe. Retraining a style encoder, adding a language, fixing a bad phoneme, all blocked.

- **Microscopic.** Under 100M parameters, under 1 GB in memory. Small enough to read the training script in an afternoon and run it on one consumer GPU.
- **Instant.** First audio in well under 100 ms on a laptop CPU. No GPU required to be usable.
- **Better than Supertonic 3.** That is the floor, not the goal: at least equal intelligibility and speaker similarity, and more expressive prosody. Measured, published, side by side.
- **Free all the way down.** No clause anywhere in the stack that a lawyer has to read twice.

- A TTS you can embed in any product without asking anyone.
- A dataset you can train your own on.
- A training recipe small enough to read in an afternoon and run on one GPU.
- A voice tool: dial in a new voice from a style vector, no retraining.
- Spanish and other languages as first-class citizens, not afterthoughts.

| Requirement | Target | 
|---|---|
| Parameters | under 100M | 
| Runtime | CPU and GPU via ONNX | 
| Latency | first audio well under 100 ms per sentence on a laptop CPU | 
| Memory | under 1 GB VRAM on GPU, under 1 GB RAM on CPU | 
| Voices | style vector, new voices without retraining | 
| Licenses | MIT code, CC0 data and weights. The most permissive there is. | 

Targets are measured, not claimed. Every tunable value lives in a config file, never in code.

State of the art. Voice cloning from seconds of audio. Emotion control. Anything that needs a GPU to be usable. If some of it comes for free, fine.

1. **Data.** Licensing rules, pipeline, first 100 clean hours of English.
2. **Bake-off.** Two or three candidate architectures on those 100 hours. One metric. Results public. Winner sets the architecture.
3. **First checkpoint.** Full English run. It will be rough. Ship it anyway. → v0.1.2 shipped (experiment 012).
4. **Voice tool.** Style-vector editor on top of the checkpoint.
5. **Languages.** Spanish first, then whatever contributors bring.

Worst case this ends as a distillation of Kokoro and Supertonic with a public recipe, and that is still something nobody has published. Best case is a fully human-licensed dataset and a model anyone can ship.

The bake-off starts from what already works. Both reference implementations are vendored as submodules under `docs/references/`.

- **StyleTTS 2 + ISTFTNet** (Kokoro's lineage). Training code exists and is public. Phoneme input, style diffusion optional, fast ISTFT vocoder.
- **Flow matching over a compressed latent** (Supertonic's lineage). Paper published, no training code. Character input, no G2P, no aligner, ConvNeXt blocks.

- **Data:** record, curate, align, verify licenses. Rules in`docs/COORDINATION.md` .
- **Architecture:** propose a bake-off candidate as an issue. Bring a config and a reason.
- **Compute:** a 3090/4090-class GPU for ablations. This does not need a swarm.
- **Sponsors:** a few thousand dollars of cloud GPU for the main run.

- `AGENTS.md` operating brief for humans and agents.
- `docs/` sourced facts:`ARCHITECTURES.md` ,`DATASETS.md` ,`REFERENCES.md` ,`COORDINATION.md` .
- `docs/references/` upstream implementations as submodules (papers linked in`docs/REFERENCES.md` ).
- `experiments/NNN-*/` one directory per experiment, each with its README, config and result.
- Training data is not in git. It is distributed via Hugging Face (`ttslibre` ); license audit in`docs/LICENSES.md` .

Pre-alpha. The Supertonic-lineage prototype in `experiments/` trains end to end (latent autoencoder, text-to-latent flow matching, ONNX export, Whisper WER in TensorBoard). First alignment reached on 2026-09-05: a 4-utterance overfit reaches WER 0.15 in 1000 steps on 1.4 GiB VRAM (`experiments/002-overfit-4-sentences/RESULTS.md`). Nothing generalizes yet.

Clone with `--recurse-submodules` to get the references.
