speakturbo-tts

speakturbo - Talk to your Claude!

Give your agent the ability to speak to you real-time. Ultra-fast text-to-speech with ~90ms latency and 8 built-in voices.

Quick Start

# Play immediately - you should hear "Hello world" through your speakers
speakturbo "Hello world"
# Output: ⚡ 92ms → ▶ 93ms → ✓ 1245ms
 
# Verify it's working by saving to file
speakturbo "Hello world" -o test.wav
ls -lh test.wav

Output explained: ⚡ = first audio received, ▶ = playback started, ✓ = done

First Run

The first execution takes 2-5 seconds while the daemon starts and loads the model into memory. Subsequent calls are ~90ms to first sound.

Usage

Available Voices

Performance

Architecture

Text Input

• Encoding: UTF-8
• Quotes in text: Use escaping: speakturbo "She said \"hello\""
• Long text: Supported, streams as it generates

Output Path Security

The -o flag only writes to directories that are on the allowlist. By default, these are:

• /tmp and system temp directories
• Your current working directory
• ~/.speakturbo/

If you need to write elsewhere, use --allow-dir:

To permanently allow a directory, add it to ~/.speakturbo/config:

The config file is one directory per line. Lines starting with # are comments.

Exit Codes

When to Use

Use speakturbo when:

• You need instant audio feedback (~90ms)
• Speed matters more than voice variety
• Built-in voices are sufficient

Use speak instead when:

• You need custom voice cloning (Morgan Freeman, etc.) → speak "text" --voice ~/.chatter/voices/morgan_freeman.wav
• You need emotion tags like [laugh], [sigh]
• Quality/variety matters more than speed

See the speak skill documentation for full usage.

Troubleshooting

No audio plays:

Daemon won't start:

First run is slow: This is expected. The daemon needs to load the ~100MB model into memory. Subsequent calls will be fast (~90ms).

Daemon Management

The daemon auto-starts on first use and auto-shuts down after 1 hour idle.

Comparison with speak