Chatterbox TTS vs ESPnet
Chatterbox TTS
github.com
ESPnet
espnet.github.ioSide by side
| Figure | Chatterbox TTS | ESPnet |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 2 |
| Spec score · Text-to-Speech Software | 9.0 (#9) | 8.9 (#17) |
| Spec score · Text-to-speech tools | 8.9 (#21) | 8.8 (#28) |
| Commercial use | Yes | Yes |
| Export formats | WAV | WAV |
| Founded | 2019 | 2018 |
| Installation | The project can be installed with pip as chatterbox-tts or from a cloned repository in editable mode. | The installation guide documents editable pip installation and optional dependency groups for tasks such as ASR, TTS, and speech enhancement. |
| License | The code and model listing identify the project as MIT licensed, permitting modification and redistribution subject to the license notice. | The project homepage states that ESPnet is released under the Apache License 2.0. |
| Platforms | linux,macos,self_hosted | The installation guide lists Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Windows 10, and macOS 12 as supported distributions or systems, with Windows and macOS marked installation only. |
| Voice cloning | Models can generate speech conditioned on a short reference audio clip. | No |
| What it does | Chatterbox is Resemble AI’s open-source family of text-to-speech and voice-cloning models. | ESPnet is an end-to-end speech-processing toolkit for recognition, synthesis, translation, enhancement, diarization, spoken-language understanding and related tasks. |
Plans
Chatterbox TTS
- Chatterbox open-source modelsFree
- Voice AI Research (Chatterbox)Free
In their own words
Chatterbox TTS
Chatterbox TTS is a family of open-source text-to-speech models from Resemble AI. Its listed choices include Turbo, Nano, Multilingual V3, and dedicated single-language models. Turbo supports tags that can prompt reactions such as sighs, gasps, coughs, and laughter; Nano is intended for on-device or CPU use when memory and latency budgets are tight. The README lists 23 languages for Multilingual. The project supports voice cloning, audio input, batch processing, voice isolation, and WAV export. Generated audio carries Resemble AI’s PerTh watermark. The repository is MIT licensed, and its listed plan costs nothing for research and development. Resemble says it has stopped offering voice generation as a commercial product, while its models remain open and free for research and development. The README provides pip and source installation instructions and describes Python 3.11 on Debian 11, with CUDA, CPU, and MPS device options. Listed platforms are Linux, macOS, and self-hosted.
ESPnet
ESPnet is an open-source toolkit for speech processing, including recognition, text-to-speech, translation, enhancement, speaker diarization, and spoken language understanding. It provides complete recipes for a range of tasks, plus tutorials, notebooks, and demos for existing models. Users can install ESPnet and espnet-model-zoo with pip to run inference on existing models; published models can also run in CPU or GPU inference containers without checking out the repository. Installation supports editable pip setup and optional dependency groups for tasks such as ASR, TTS, and speech enhancement. Training requires a separate extra that includes Lightning, TensorBoard, W&B, torch_optimizer, matplotlib, and Dask. Some task-specific packages must also be installed separately when a recipe needs them. ESPnet 1 is no longer supported, while ESPnet2 users can skip installing Kaldi. The toolkit is released under Apache License 2.0 and permits commercial use. It offers API access and lists Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted platforms; WAV is the listed export format.