We ran out of ElevenLabs credits. This episode introduces our new open-source voices powered by Kokoro, an 82-million parameter text-to-speech model built on StyleTTS 2. We explain the Docker container saga of running Python 3.12 dependencies on a 3.13 host, rave about CPU-only inference speed, tease a future deep-dive on the papers behind lightweight neural TTS, demo Spanish multilingual support, and test whether our new voices can laugh. Plus: we are massively backlogged with topics including FAST 2026 conference coverage.

Interactive Visualization: New Voices, Same Nerds: The Kokoro TTS Episode