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Comment by jawns

3 months ago

Based on the demo video, the TTS sounds like it's 10 years out of date. I would not enjoy interacting with it.

The default TTS voice (Piper) is a lightweight model optimized for speed over quality. It's fast but yeah, it doesn't sound great.

If you install Kokoro TTS (rcli models > TTS section), the voice quality is dramatically better, it's a neural TTS model with 28 different voices. MetalRT synthesizes Kokoro at 178ms for short responses, so you don't pay a speed penalty for the upgrade.

We should probably make Kokoro the default or atleast make the upgrade path more obvious in the first-run experience. Fair feedback.