Piper

by Rhasspy

Fast neural TTS for Home Assistant — pairs with Whisper.

Looking at Piper? Try this first.

Drop your audio. Transcript in seconds. First transcript free, then $4 = 300 min

Upstream is archived. Piper’s repository has been set read-only by its owner, so there are no further releases, fixes, or security patches. The last commit landed 2025-08-26. It can still be cloned and run, and forks may be maintained elsewhere. See the repository.

TL;DR

Best for on-device TTS to read back transcripts or LLM replies. Pricing: free.

Category
Open source
License
MIT
Stars
★ 11.3k
Last push
2025-08-26
Pricing
free
Platforms
Linux, macOS, Windows, Raspberry Pi

What it is

A blazing-fast neural TTS by Rhasspy. MIT.

Best for: On-device TTS to read back transcripts or LLM replies.
Watch out for: TTS only.

Install / use

pip install piper-tts

Features

Speaker diarizationNo
Word-level timestampsYes
Streaming / real-timeNo
Languages supported40
HIPAA eligibleNo

Links

GitHub repo ↗

Piper vs Whipscribe

FeaturePiperWhipscribe
CategoryOpen sourceTranscription APIs
Pricingfree$4–$24 one-time packs (credits never expire) · $2 single unlock · 60 min free on signup
Speaker diarizationNoYes
Word timestampsYesYes
StreamingNoNo
Languages4099
PlatformsLinux, macOS, Windows, Raspberry PiWeb, API, MCP

Alternatives to Piper

OpenAI Whisper
OpenAI

The reference open-source multilingual ASR model from OpenAI.

OSS · MIT ★ 107.0k
whisper.cpp
Georgi Gerganov

C/C++ port of Whisper — runs on anything, from a Raspberry Pi to Apple Silicon.

OSS · MIT ★ 52.8k
faster-whisper
SYSTRAN

4× faster than reference Whisper using CTranslate2 — production sweet spot.

OSS · MIT ★ 24.8k

Whipscribe is a managed faster-whisper + whisperX service. If you want transcripts without running infrastructure, paste a URL or drop a file in the form below — you'll have a transcript in seconds.