MeloTTS
High-quality multilingual TTS library by MyShell with fast CPU inference.
About
MeloTTS came out of a collaboration between MIT and MyShell.ai as a multilingual text-to-speech library with an unusual emphasis on CPU speed: it performs real-time inference without a GPU. Language coverage includes English with American, British, Indian, and Australian accents, plus Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, including mixed Chinese and English sentences. The implementation builds on the VITS family of architectures (VITS, VITS2, and Bert-VITS2) and can be used through a Python API, a command line interface, a web UI, or hosted demos, with documentation for training voices on custom datasets. Everything ships under the MIT license, which allows free commercial and non-commercial use, a point that distinguishes it from several popular TTS projects with restrictive terms. It is a frequent choice for embedding speech output in applications, voice agents, and edge deployments where GPU hosting is impractical.
Should you use MeloTTS?
Pick it when
Pick MeloTTS when you need multilingual speech, including accented English variants and mixed Chinese-English sentences, running in real time on CPU-only servers or edge boxes, under an MIT license that clears commercial use.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if you need to clone a specific voice from a sample, since it ships fixed voices and new voices mean training on your own dataset. OpenVoice adds cloning from the same team, and Kokoro adds Hindi, Italian, and Portuguese on similar hardware.
Alternatives to MeloTTS
- Kokoro TTS
Also CPU friendly, with Apache-2.0 weights and streaming output; it adds Hindi, Italian, and Portuguese but drops Korean.
- Piper TTS
Runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 with many voices in dozens of languages, but the current piper1-gpl release is GPL, stricter than MeloTTS's MIT.
- OpenVoice
Same MyShell team, adds zero-shot cloning from a short clip with style control, but wants a GPU with about 4 GB where MeloTTS runs on CPU.
- Sherpa-ONNX TTS
Runs MeloTTS models among others through ONNX Runtime on Android, iOS, and WebAssembly, the better route when you ship inside a mobile app.
Reviews (0)
Leave a Review
No reviews yet. Be the first to review!
Details
- Category
- Text-to-Speech (TTS)
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Easy (2/5)
- License
- MIT
- Added
- Apr 3, 2026