Speech and voices

Vis can speak text and transcribe recordings with speech engines that run on your gateway. You can also add your own voice from a short recording and use it like a built-in voice.

When to use

You want spoken audio for a podcast, a summary or a voice message. Read Speak text.
You want a voice that sounds like you or like a colleague. Add your own voice from a short recording.
You want to change or remove a voice that you added. Read Change or remove a voice.
You want to check what a recording says. Read Transcribe a recording.

To make these calls from a program or an extension, read Speech API. To choose the engines in the app, read Configuration.

Speech engines

The gateway runs each engine on its own computer. The first use of an engine downloads its model. The download can take some minutes.

Engine	Use	Voices
`vibevoice-local`	Natural speech for long text, with a seed for each take	Built-in voices, such as `emma` and `carter`
`qwen3-tts-local`	Expressive speech in ten languages	Built-in voices, such as `ryan` and `serena`, and voices that you add
`pocket-tts-local`	Fast speech with your own voices	Built-in voices and voices that you add
`piper-local`	Small and fast speech	Built-in voices
`parakeet-local`	Fast transcription of short recordings	—
`vibevoice-asr-local`	Transcription of long recordings	—

The Voice section of the Companion settings selects the default engines.

The qwen3-tts-local model is 3.7 GB, and Vis downloads it on first use. On a CPU, it speaks at about the speed of playback.

A request sends the text, an optional voice and an optional engine. Short text comes back at once. Long text runs as a job, and the client waits for its audio. The answer is usually a 24 kHz mono WAV file.

Engines such as vibevoice-local and qwen3-tts-local sample noise. Give a seed to get the same take again. Give another seed to get a different take of the same text.

Add your own voice

Record 3 to 30 seconds of one person who speaks clearly, without music or other voices. Then add the recording with a name. pocket-tts-local learns the voice from it.

Add what the recording says as its transcript. The transcript improves the voice.
Record only people who agree to the use of their voice.
Vis keeps the voices that you add in ~/.vis/voices on the gateway computer. Every program that uses this gateway can use them.

The voice gets an ID from its name. Scripts and settings use this ID.

qwen3-tts-local also speaks the voices that you add. For these voices, Vis downloads a second model of about 1.8 GB on first use. On a CPU, one second of speech takes about 1 to 2 seconds. A transcript makes the voice closer to the recording.

For the best copy of a voice with qwen3-tts-local, use these steps:

Use 5 to 10 seconds of calm reading, and end the recording at the end of a sentence.
Give the exact transcript. If a sentence starts with words of the recording, cut the recording again.
Use speech in one of the ten languages of the model. Other languages, such as Polish, get an accent.

Change or remove a voice

You can change the name, the language and the transcript of a voice that you added. The ID stays the same, so scripts that use the voice continue to work. To replace the audio, add a new recording with the same name.

When you remove a voice, Vis deletes its recording. You cannot remove a built-in voice.

Transcribe a recording

Send a 16-bit PCM WAV recording. The engine returns the text and its time segments. Use vibevoice-asr-local for recordings that are longer than a few sentences.