ChatTTS

ChatTTS is an open-source text-to-speech model designed specifically for conversational APPlications. Unlike General-purpose TTS systems, it targets the rhythms and nuances of dialogue, making it suitable for voice-enabled assistants, conversational audio, and nARRated vIDEo intros. The model supports both Chinese and English, and its training on a large corpus of bilingual speech helps it produce natural-sounding ouTPUt.

What it does

ChatTTS converts written text into spoken audio with an emphASIs on dialog-like delivery. It can generate speech for LLM assistant responses, spoken introductions, and other scenarios where a conversational tone matters. The project also offers some fine-grAIned controls, such as inserting laughter, pauses between utterances, and filler words, which can make synthetic speech feel more expressive.

Key capabilities

• Bilingual support – handles both Chinese and English text, with training data covering a substantial amount of bilingual speech.
• Conversation-oriented design – optimized for dialogue tasks rather than only reading long-form text.
• Expressive controls – allows optional laughter, pauses, and discourse markers to shape delivery.
• multi-speaker potential – supports generating speech with different speaker charACTeristics, though results may vary.
• Open-source availability – code and model resources are available for developers and researchers.

Who it is for

ChatTTS is aimed at developers building voice interfaces for large language models, researchers exploring conversational speech synthesis, and creators who need natural-sounding bilingual narration. It can be useful for prototyping voice assistants, producing audio for conversational Agents, or adding speech to interactive applications. Because it is Open Source, it also appeals to teams that want to inspect, modify, or integrate the model into their own pipelines.

How to get started

Getting started typically involves downloading the code from its public repository, installing dependencies such as PyTorch, and loading the pretrained model. From there, you can pass text to the model's inference method and play or save the generated audio. The exact setup steps and API may change as the project evolves, so consult the current documentation for the most accurate instructions. Basic usage does not require a paid subscription, but running the model locally or on Cloud Infrastructure may involve compute costs.

Pricing and access caveat

ChatTTS is generally available as a free, open-source project. There is no official paid tier advertised, but access to the model and its performance depend on your hardware and environment. The project team has mentioned plans for improvements, watermarking, and LLM integration, so features and licensing details may change over time. Always verify the latest terms and capabilities from the official project sources before relying on it for production use.