Quick Start Guide

This guide provides a minimal "Hello, World!" example to get you up and running with Piper in just a few steps.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have completed the Installation Guide and have:

  1. Installed the piper-tts Python package.
  2. Downloaded at least one voice model.

For this guide, we will assume you have downloaded the en_US-lessac-medium voice.

Step 1: Synthesize Text to a WAV File

The most basic use of Piper is to convert a line of text into an audio file using the command-line interface.

Open your terminal and run the following command. This tells Piper to use the specified model (-m) to generate a WAV file (-f) from the provided text.

python3 -m piper -m en_US-lessac-medium.onnx -f output.wav -- 'Welcome to the world of speech synthesis!'

After running the command, you will find a file named output.wav in your current directory. Play this file to hear the synthesized audio.

Note: You must provide the full path to the .onnx model file. If the voice files are in a different directory, use the --data-dir flag to specify their location.

Step 2: Synthesize and Play Audio Directly

If you have ffplay (part of the FFmpeg suite) installed, you can have Piper synthesize and play the audio directly without saving it to a file. Simply omit the -f (output file) argument.

python3 -m piper -m en_US-lessac-medium.onnx -- 'This will play on your speakers.'

This command will load the model, synthesize the audio, and stream it directly to ffplay for immediate playback.

What's Next?

You have successfully synthesized your first speech with Piper! To explore more advanced features, check out the following guides: