Piper TTS Voice Training

Train custom text-to-speech voices compatible with Piper's lightweight ONNX runtime.

Overview

Piper produces fast, offline TTS suitable for embedded devices. Training involves:

1. Corpus preparation (text covering phonetic range)
2. Audio generation or recording
3. Quality validation via Whisper transcription
4. Fine-tuning from existing checkpoint (recommended) or training from scratch
5. ONNX export for deployment

Fine-tuning vs from-scratch:

• Fine-tuning: ~1,300 phrases + 1,000 epochs (days on modest GPU)
• From scratch: ~13,000+ phrases + 2,000+ epochs (weeks/months)

Workflow