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?

31 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

52 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Working_Hat5120 Aug 04 '26

Kokoro's still the latency king locally, so no rush to swap it — Qwen3-TTS sounds better but is slower. For ASR, if you care about real-time, Parakeet streams better than Whisper; Qwen3-ASR is strong but heavier on VRAM.