What is zonos?

Zonos is an open-source text-to-speech model that converts written text into spoken audio. It was trained on over 200,000 hours of multilingual speech recordings, which the developers say gives it natural-sounding output that competes with commercial text-to-speech services. One of its main features is voice cloning. You give it a short audio clip of a person speaking, typically 10 to 30 seconds, and it can generate new speech that sounds like that person saying whatever text you provide. It also supports an audio prefix mode, where you supply a short audio starter clip alongside your text, which can produce more nuanced results such as whispering or specific vocal styles that are harder to capture from a speaker sample alone. The model gives you control over several qualities of the generated speech. You can adjust speaking rate, pitch variation, and audio quality. You can also specify emotional tone, choosing from options like happiness, fear, sadness, and anger. Output audio is produced at 44kHz, which is reasonably high quality for spoken audio. Zonos supports English, Japanese, Chinese, French, and German. It requires a graphics card with at least 6GB of video memory for practical use, though it can run on a regular computer processor if you have enough memory, just much more slowly. Linux and macOS are the supported operating systems, with experimental Windows support available through a community fork. Installation is handled through Python package tools, with Docker also available for an easier setup path. The project includes a Gradio web interface, which is a simple browser-based UI, so you can test it without writing any code. A hosted online version is also available if you want to try it without installing anything locally.