AgentBridge speaks with a local neural TTS engine. Kokoro is the engine: it works on
every machine, immediately, with nothing to install. The engine catalog is designed to
grow — a future engine registers in TtsEngineSupport (AIOrchestrator) and is then
selectable through the same /ttsengine command and appsettings preference.
| Engine | Works out of the box | Model | Speed | When to use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kokoro (default) | Yes — everywhere (Windows, Linux, macOS; any CPU; no drivers, no accounts) | ~325 MB, included in the archive | realtime on a normal CPU | The default — the voice for the chat, the phone and the podcast tool |
The engine is selected through the same preference every time:
/ttsenginein the terminal UI (menu Settings → TTS Engine) — shows the known engines and sets the engine.appsettings.json→"Tts": { "Engine": "kokoro" }(the/ttsenginecommand persists here). A value outside the catalog falls back to Kokoro and logs why, so a stale setting never breaks the TTS.
The catalog (
TtsEngineSupportin Graphene.AIOrchestrator) currently registers Kokoro only. Future engines add their name + availability gate there and inherit the selection path (host config,/ttsengine,PODCAST_TTS_ENGINEfor the plugins) without host changes.
- The voices and the model (
kokoro.onnx) are shipped inside every archive — no download, no drivers, no accounts. - Phonemization is fully managed (no espeak binaries), so it behaves identically on Windows, Linux and macOS, x64 and ARM64.
- The terminal, the SIP phone bridge and the podcast tool all use this engine in-process.
- GPU acceleration (optional): when the CUDA Toolkit 12.x + cuDNN 9.x are installed, the engine uses the CUDA execution provider automatically (the archive ships the provider DLL). Without CUDA it runs on the CPU — realtime anyway on a normal machine. No manual setup; the engine probes the standard install directories and sets the runtime PATH itself.
| Requirement | Needed for | How to install (official) |
|---|---|---|
| nothing | Kokoro (CPU) | — |
| NVIDIA driver | Kokoro GPU (CUDA, optional) | https://www.nvidia.com/drivers |
| CUDA Toolkit 12.x + cuDNN 9.x | Kokoro GPU (CUDA, optional) | https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads · https://developer.nvidia.com/cudnn |
Kokoro needs no espeak, no native phonemizer, no audio stack: it ships everything in
managed code and works on Windows, Linux and macOS out of the box. The install.ps1
one-liner detects a CUDA-capable GPU and asks whether to install the CUDA Toolkit +
cuDNN silently; answering no keeps everything working on the CPU, and the GPU is picked up
automatically at runtime if the toolkit is installed later.
- "kokoro.onnx not found" — the model file is missing next to the executable; reinstall from the latest release archive (it is included).
- A podcast records with a wrong voice — the tool resolves the voice from the episode language; check the configured language (a missing voice falls back to the first loaded one).