Chatterbox TTS: the Open Source ElevenLabs Alternative?

Rebecca Kovács

Rebecca Kovács

6 June 2025

Chatterbox TTS: the Open Source ElevenLabs Alternative?
💡
Want a great API Testing tool that generates beautiful API Documentation?

Want an integrated, All-in-One platform for your Developer Team to work together with maximum productivity?

Apidog delivers all your demans, and replaces Postman at a much more affordable price!
button

In the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, high-quality Text-to-Speech (TTS) models have become essential tools for developers, content creators, and businesses alike. While many powerful TTS systems exist, they are often closed-source and come with restrictive licenses and high costs. Today, we're diving deep into a game-changing new player in the field: Chatterbox TTS by Resemble AI.

This comprehensive tutorial will guide you through everything you need to know about Chatterbox TTS. We'll explore what makes it special, how to get it running, and how to harness its powerful features to generate expressive, human-like speech for your projects.

What is Chatterbox TTS?

A Comparison of Chatterbox and Elevenlabs

Chatterbox is a state-of-the-art, production-grade open-source TTS model developed by the team at Resemble AI. Released under the permissive MIT license, Chatterbox empowers everyone to create high-quality speech synthesis without being locked into a proprietary ecosystem.

Built on a powerful 0.5B Llama backbone, Chatterbox has been trained on a massive dataset of half a million hours of cleaned audio data. This extensive training has resulted in a model that is not only highly capable but has also been benchmarked against leading closed-source alternatives like ElevenLabs, often being preferred in side-by-side comparisons.

Key Features of Chatterbox TTS

So, what sets Chatterbox apart from the crowd? Here are some of its standout features:

Getting Started with Chatterbox TTS

Now that you're acquainted with what Chatterbox can do, let's get it set up and ready to run.

Prerequisites

Before you can start generating speech, you'll need to have Python installed on your system. Chatterbox requires Python version 3.8 or newer. You'll also need pip, the Python package installer, which typically comes with modern Python installations.

Installation

Installing Chatterbox is as simple as running a single command in your terminal. This command will download and install Chatterbox and all of its dependencies, including powerful libraries like PyTorch and Transformers.

pip install chatterbox-tts

That's it! With that one command, you're ready to start synthesizing speech.

Your First Words: Basic TTS Generation

Let's start with a simple example of generating speech from a piece of text. The following Python script will take a sentence and save it as a WAV audio file.

import torch
import torchaudio as ta
from chatterbox.tts import ChatterboxTTS

# Automatically detect the best available device (GPU or CPU)
if torch.cuda.is_available():
    device = "cuda"
elif hasattr(torch.backends, 'mps') and torch.backends.mps.is_available():
    device = "mps" # For Apple Silicon Macs
else:
    device = "cpu"

print(f"Using device: {device}")

# Load the Chatterbox model
model = ChatterboxTTS.from_pretrained(device=device)

# The text you want to convert to speech
text = "Hello, world! I am Chatterbox, a powerful open-source text-to-speech engine."

# Generate the audio waveform
wav = model.generate(text)

# Save the generated audio to a file
ta.save("hello_chatterbox.wav", wav, model.sr)

print("Audio saved as hello_chatterbox.wav")

Let's break down what's happening in this script:

  1. We import the necessary libraries: torch for core tensor operations, torchaudio for audio file handling, and ChatterboxTTS for the main model.
  2. We include a handy piece of code that automatically detects if you have a compatible GPU (cuda for NVIDIA, mps for Apple Silicon) and falls back to the CPU if not. This ensures the code runs efficiently on different hardware.
  3. We load the pretrained Chatterbox model using ChatterboxTTS.from_pretrained(), passing in our detected device.
  4. We define the text we want to synthesize.
  5. We call model.generate(text) to create the audio waveform.
  6. Finally, we use torchaudio.save() to save the waveform as a WAV file. model.sr provides the correct sample rate for the audio.

The Art of Voice Cloning

One of Chatterbox's most exciting capabilities is voice cloning. You can provide a short audio clip of a voice, and Chatterbox will use it to generate speech in that same voice.

Here's how you can do it:

For the best results, your audio prompt should be a clean recording of a single person speaking, preferably without background noise. A few seconds of audio is often enough for Chatterbox to get a good sense of the voice.

To launch the web UI, you'll first need to install Gradio:

pip install gradio

Then, save the following code as a Python file (e.g., app.py) and run it from your terminal with python app.py. This script is often included as gradio_tts_app.py in the project files.

After running the script, you'll see a local URL in your terminal. Open this URL in your web browser to access the interface.

You'll be greeted with a clean and intuitive layout where you can:

The Gradio app is the perfect way to quickly experiment with different voices and settings without having to write any code.

Fine-Tuning, Voice Conversion and Voice Watermarks in ChatterBox

This is where Chatterbox truly shines. You can direct the performance of the synthesized voice using two key parameters: exaggeration and cfg_weight.

Experiment with these parameters to find the perfect delivery for your content.

Chatterbox also includes a powerful voice conversion feature. This allows you to take an audio recording of someone speaking and convert it into a different target voice.

With great power comes great responsibility. Resemble AI has integrated their PerTh (Perceptual Threshold) watermarking technology directly into Chatterbox. Every piece of audio generated by the model contains an inaudible watermark. This watermark is robust and can survive common audio manipulations, allowing the audio to be traced back to the model that created it.

Conclusion: Your Voice, Your Way

Chatterbox TTS is more than just another text-to-speech model. It's a powerful, flexible, and open platform for creating expressive and high-quality synthetic speech. Its combination of state-of-the-art performance, unique features like emotion control, and a commitment to open-source and responsible AI makes it an invaluable tool for any developer or creator.

Whether you're building the next great AI assistant, creating engaging content for videos and games, or just exploring the creative possibilities of speech synthesis, Chatterbox gives you the freedom and the power to bring your ideas to life.

To learn more, try out the live demo on Hugging Face Spaces:

Chatterbox TTS - a Hugging Face Space by ResembleAI
Convert written text into high-quality speech using a reference audio file for style. Users provide text and an optional audio prompt to tailor the speech. The app returns the generated speech as a...

Explore more

MemVid: Replacing Vector Databases with MP4 Files

MemVid: Replacing Vector Databases with MP4 Files

Memvid is a groundbreaking AI memory library that revolutionizes how we store and search large volumes of text. Instead of relying on traditional databases, Memvid cleverly encodes text chunks into MP4 video files, enabling lightning-fast semantic search without the need for a complex database setup. This innovative approach makes it incredibly efficient, portable, and easy to use, especially for offline applications. 💡Want a great API Testing tool that generates beautiful API Documentation?

6 June 2025

Get ChatGPT Team for Almost Free ($1 for 5 Seats): Here is How

Get ChatGPT Team for Almost Free ($1 for 5 Seats): Here is How

Discover how to access ChatGPT Team for just $1 and enhance your development workflow with Apidog's free MCP Server. Get premium AI features and powerful API development tools in one comprehensive guide.

6 June 2025

3 Methods to Unlock Claude 4 for Free

3 Methods to Unlock Claude 4 for Free

Learn how to use Claude 4 for free, master vibe coding workflows, and see why Apidog MCP Server is the all-in-one API development platform you need.

6 June 2025

Practice API Design-first in Apidog

Discover an easier way to build and use APIs