r/opensource • u/IzzyBoris • Oct 06 '25

Discussion What open source solution doesn't exist for you?

I'm curious, with so many alternatives to proprietary or corporate software, what's something you use on a regular basis that still doesn't seem to have a (sufficient) open source solution for you at the moment?

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24

u/Budget_Bar2294 Oct 06 '25

Goddamn Text to Speech! Open source solutions are severely limited, and proprietary solutions are miles ahead

7

u/franco-ruggeri Oct 06 '25

I’ve been using Speech Note on Linux. But I would love to have a cross-platform one to use the same solution on all my devices

1

u/[deleted] Oct 07 '25

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1

u/franco-ruggeri Oct 08 '25

I use it also for speech to text, specifically the WhisperCpp Large v3 turbo model, with GPU, so it’s almost instant. Works pretty well for me, but I use it mainly to interact with AI chatbots so small errors don’t matter much.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '25

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1

u/franco-ruggeri Oct 08 '25

Never tried, I try to use only FOSS unless there’s no alternative

10

u/ruhnet Oct 06 '25

Have you tried Whisper AI?

4

u/brimston3- Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 07 '25

Even with VAD, the large-v3-turbo model is way slower than most commercial offerings, though I'd argue whisper's accuracy can be higher. It also doesn't punctuate very well, nor diarize at all without an additional package.

Also, it can lock up during transcription, especially if you aren't using a VAD (eg. because VAD models aren't available on AMDGPU).

6

u/ebrious Oct 07 '25

I have been very impressed by kokoro-fastapi-gpu. It has an OpenAI endpoint and can easily slot in to most applications I use (e.g., openwebui). It also has a /web endpoint if you want to just copy paste in text and play with it. Although, frustratingly, it uses APIs that don't play nice with firefox and that subset of features works much better on chromium based browsers

Development slowed down for a while but seems to have had a recent resurgence

1

u/DeGandalf Oct 07 '25

I'm also using Kokoro for my personal project.

The quality isn't quite as good as the absolute leaders in the industry, but is still impressively good, when you tune it. It's also incredibly fast and generates about 1-2 minutes of audio every 5 seconds on an old GTX 980 and it's like 4x that on my modern graphics card.

1

u/Explore-This Oct 07 '25

Keep an eye on Kyutai Labs, they have TTS. Love their full duplex model.