I've been using festival under Linux.

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/festival.1....

But it is quite old now and pre-dates the DL/AI era.

Does anybody know of a good modern replacement that I can "apt install"?

I used piper with a model I found online. It's _ALOT_ better than festival afaik. I'm not sure you can apt install it though.

echo "hello" | piper --model ~/.local/share/piper/en_US-lessac-medium.onnx --output_file - | aplay

You can in fact apt install piper.

That's a different piper.

    piper - GTK application to configure gaming devices

Do any of the top models let you pause and think while speaking? I have to speak non-stop to Gemini assitant and ChatGPT, which is very very useless/unnatural for voice mode. Specially for non-english speakers probably. I sometimes have to think more to translate my thoughts to english.

Have you tried talking to ChatGPT in your native tongue? I was blown away by my mother speaking her native tongue to ChatGPT and having it respond in that language. (It's ever so slightly not a mainstream one.)

<pedantic>Voice recognition identifies who you are, speech recognition identifies what you say. </pedantic>

Example:

Voice recognition: arrrrrrgh! (Oh, I know that guy. He always gets irritated when someone uses terms speech and voice recognition wrong)

Speech Recognition: "Why can't you guys keep it straight? It is as simple as knowing the difference between hypothesis and theory."

These have gotten good enough to really make command-by-voice interactions pleasant. I'd love to try this with Cursor - just use it fully with voice.

This is perfect for me. I just started working on the voice related stuff for my agent framework and this will be of real use. Thanks.

Can't wait for this to land in MacWhisper. I like the idea of the streaming dictation especially when dictating long prompts to Claude Code.

It supports Turing T4, but not Ampere…

Any ideas on how to add Ampere support? I have a use case in mind that I would love to try on my 3090 rig

Magpie-TTS needs a kernel compiled targeting Ampere, but it appears to be closed source. It was compiled for the 2018 T4, but not 2020-2024 consumer cards, just 2025 consumer cards.

There's also the excellent also open source unmute.sh. which alas is also Nvidia only at this point. https://unmute.sh/

The game show is pretty good. Have a feeling this project will consume all my attention this week, thanks for the tip.