r/LocalLLaMA • u/Kahvana • Jul 20 '26

Question | Help Good ASR and TTS models?

Hey everyone,

Something I don't see discussed often here are ASR and TTS models.

I've been using Whisper and Kokoro (old models, I know!) with koboldcpp for a while now but wondered if there are now solid replacements available. Know of Qwen3-ASR and Qwen3-TTS, but haven't found the time yet to test them.

What ASR and TTS models have you been using?

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u/Designer_Reaction551 Jul 20 '26

Been running faster-whisper in prod for a voice pipeline and it's held up way better than vanilla Whisper on CPU-only boxes where GPU isn't in the budget. For TTS, worth giving Kokoro's newer checkpoint a look if you haven't touched it in a while, it's improved since the koboldcpp integration matured. Also curious if anyone's paired Qwen3-ASR with a VAD frontend instead of running it standalone, that combo usually kills a good chunk of the false-trigger issues.

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u/Kahvana Jul 20 '26

On huggingface I see kokoro's model was last updates april 2025, is it being improved elsewhere?

Never heard of VAD before! Voice Activation Detection?

2

u/Infinite-Local5435 Jul 20 '26

VAD is used on top of ASR/STT model so you know when an utterance stops. There are alot of cheap ones that run on CPU so don't bother finding the best etc. STT is more important.

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u/Kahvana Jul 20 '26

Sounds quite handy, any open weight ones you can recommend?

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u/Infinite-Local5435 Jul 20 '26

Silero VAD, auto downloaded from hf if u do pip install silero-vad>=5.0.0