Until recently, getting natural-sounding text-to-speech usually meant using a hosted service. If you wanted good quality, you ended up calling an API from Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. That works, but it means relying on a remote service and paying per use for a task that doesn't inherently need to be remote.
There are now models that run fast enough on a regular CPU to be useful in practice. They don't need a GPU, and the audio quality is comparable to what you get from common cloud TTS services. Everything runs locally, without relying on third-party APIs.This aligns well with the expectations of privacy-oriented users.
I wanted to make local, CPU-only text-to-speech conversion usable without requiring people to understand or assemble the underlying tooling, so I built a simple GUI converter that can convert long texts to speech in a matter of minutes.
It supports basic desktop workflows like drag and drop, which makes it more convenient than uploading text to a service and downloading the generated audio files. You can drop in text files, run batch conversions, and get audio files out, all locally.
This is what the main conversion tab looks like while a conversion is running. The focus is on keeping the workflow simple and local: drop text files, process them in batches, and get audio files out without external services.
Here's what the main conversion tab looks like while a conversion is running.
The application is free and runs entirely offline. Project details and downloads are available at https://jimlet.com
This project exists because CPU-only text-to-speech is finally fast enough to be useful. That makes it practical to build local tools that don't rely on cloud APIs or specialized hardware, and to keep them simple and self-contained.
Top comments (2)
Hey Louis! I sent you a mail via your Contact page on jimlet.com. I ordered the TTS Converter but I didn't get to a confirmation page after the Paypal transaction went through after clicking page, unfortunately I couldn't download the program because I just got to an almost blank page with this text only:
"Internal Server Error.
The server encounter and internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there is an error in the application."
Just thought I'd let you know. Hope that issue can be resolved. It seems like the perfect TTS program, like what TextAloud should be or like the next TextAloud-like program but this time not with SAPI5-voices but with good AI-voices that you can convert offline like I and many others used to do many years ago with TextAloud, then we started using web AI-TTS sites but it's an incredible hassle to make AI TTS-audiobooks like this, and the voices you get with Balabolka TTS Online Services aren't good either and it takes too much time to generate and several of the provider options doesn't even work for me.
/Erik
Hi Erik - thanks for reporting this. The issue has been resolved now, and I’ve emailed you the download link. Sorry about the trouble, and thank you for using Jimlet!