Piper
Fast, natural text-to-speech voices – including German, no graphics card needed.
Piper turns text into speech and even runs on a Raspberry Pi. There are plenty of German voices, for example "thorsten".
How to try it
Commands from the official guides – just copy them.
Google Colab
- Download the notebook: colab.ipynb
- Open colab.research.google.com → File → Upload notebook
- Runtime → Change runtime type → GPU (T4)
- Runtime → Run all
Linux
# One-time setup: install uv (package manager for Python, no sudo needed)
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh && source $HOME/.local/bin/env
uv venv --python 3.12 piper-env && source piper-env/bin/activate
uv pip install piper-tts
python -m piper.download_voices de_DE-thorsten-high
python -m piper -m de_DE-thorsten-high -f hallo.wav -- 'Hallo, das ist eine Testansage.'
# Result: hallo.wav in the current foldermacOS
# One-time setup: install uv (package manager for Python, no sudo needed)
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh && source $HOME/.local/bin/env
uv venv --python 3.12 piper-env && source piper-env/bin/activate
uv pip install piper-tts
python -m piper.download_voices de_DE-thorsten-high
python -m piper -m de_DE-thorsten-high -f hallo.wav -- 'Hallo, das ist eine Testansage.'
# Result: hallo.wav in the current folderWindows (PowerShell)
# One-time setup: install uv (package manager for Python)
powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"
$env:Path = "$HOME\.local\bin;$env:Path"
uv venv --python 3.12 piper-env
uv pip install --python piper-env piper-tts
.\piper-env\Scripts\python.exe -m piper.download_voices de_DE-thorsten-high
.\piper-env\Scripts\python.exe -m piper -m de_DE-thorsten-high -f hallo.wav -- 'Hallo, das ist eine Testansage.'
# Result: hallo.wav in the current folderAsk the AI assistant
Questions about Piper, installation or background? Our assistant knows this page and runs on our own machine, not in someone else's cloud.
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