Tortoise TTS

Community · 2022 · Speech Synthesis · Open-source/community

A to Z

A · App: No
B · Built By: Community
C · CEO & Politics: [UNKNOWN]
D · Date: 2022
E · Expertise: Intermediate+
F · Free Tier: Yes
G · Generates: Text only
H · Deployment: Cloud + Local (open weights)
I · Inputs: Text
J · Jurisdiction: Open-source/community
K · Key Staffers: James Betker (Creator)
L · Languages: English-primary
M · Model Type: Speech Synthesis
N · Safety Issues: Synthetic audio risks: voice cloning or impersonation misuse, copyright/style imitation concerns, and possible unsafe or biased outputs depending on deployment safeguards.
O · Open Source: Yes — open weights
P · Pricing: Free (open source, Apache 2.0)
Q · AIDb Rating: [UNKNOWN]
R · What Makes It Special: Tortoise (TorToiSe), a text-to-speech program built for strong multi-voice capabilities and highly realistic prosody and intonation, combining an autoregressive decoder with a diffusion decoder; its author named it for being very slow (originally about one medium-sized sentence every 2 minutes on a K80), but it now reaches a 0.25-0.3 real-time factor on 4GB of VRAM and under 500 ms latency with streaming.
S · Stock / Status: Research / open-source project
T · Training Cutoff: [UNKNOWN]
U · Users: [UNKNOWN]
V · Voice Chat: No
W · Weights: Downloadable
X · X Handle: [UNKNOWN]
Y · Year Founded: [UNKNOWN]
Z · Bottom Line: Open-weights Speech Synthesis from Community, released 2022.

Data completeness 77% · Last verified 2026-05-12 · Primary source ↗

“Tortoise TTS.” AIDb — The AI Database. Verified 2026-05-12. https://theaidatabase.com/m/tortoise-tts.html