# TTS

SillyTavern has a wide range of TTS (text-to-speech) options that are used to have a voice narrate parts of your chat. This page explains the setup and use.

## Configuring TTS

### TTS Provider Selection

Used to select which TTS service you want to use. Some of the options are free, some require a paid subscription, and some run locally on your PC.

Available options (list may change over time):

- **AllTalk** - free, open source local installation, offers a variety of TTS engines. See the [AllTalk](./AllTalk.md) page for setup instructions.
- **Azure TTS** - same voices as Microsoft Edge. Requires an Azure account and a paid subscription.
- **Coqui-TTS** (deprecated) - free, requires Extras API to run. High-performance Text2Speech models (Tacotron, Tacotron2, Glow-TTS, SpeedySpeech) as well as Bark.
- **Edge** - free, runs via Azure. When running with "Plugin" selected as the provider, you also need to install [this server plugin](https://github.com/SillyTavern/SillyTavern-EdgeTTS-Plugin). Other option requires Extras API (deprecated) to run.
- **Electron Hub** - reuses your [Electron Hub](https://electronhub.ai/) API key to access cloud voices (GPT-4o Mini TTS, Microsoft neural voices, etc.) with per-model controls.
- **ElevenLabs** - paid subscription required. Get an API key from [ElevenLabs](https://elevenlabs.io/).
- **Google Translate** - a free voice provided by Google, one per language, quality can vary widely.
- **Google Gemini TTS** - requires an API key from either [Vertex AI](/Usage/API_Connections/google.md#google-vertex-ai) or [AI Studio](/Usage/API_Connections/google.md#google-ai-studio), uses [Gemini TTS](https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/gemini-tts) models.
- **Kokoro** - free, uses [kokoro.js](https://www.npmjs.com/package/kokoro-js) to run the model locally in your browser. However, [some browsers](https://caniuse.com/webgpu) may not support WebGPU for the device option.
- **MiniMax** - requires an API key from [MiniMax](https://www.minimax.io/). See the [MiniMax TTS](./MiniMaxTTS.md) page for setup instructions.
- **Novel** - requires a paid NovelAI subscription, generated by NovelAI's TTS engine
- **OpenAI** - paid API key required, uses OpenAI's TTS models.
- **Pollinations** - free of charge access to OpenAI TTS models, but with a rate limit. [Website](https://pollinations.ai/).
- **Silero** - free, runs on your PC, quality can vary widely. Requires a [dedicated API server](https://github.com/ouoertheo/silero-api-server) installation or Extras API (deprecated).
- **System** - uses your OS TTS engine, if one exists. Quality can vary widely depending on the OS.
- **XTTS** - free, requires a dedicated API server installation. See the [XTTS](./XTTS.md) page for setup instructions.

### Checkboxes

- **Enabled** - turns TTS playback on/off
- **Auto Generation** - lets TTS start playing automatically when a new message enters the chat
- **Only narrate "quotes"** - Limits TTS playback to only include text within `"quotation marks"`. This will `*include "quotes" within asterisk lines*` (internal variable name = `narrate_quoted_only`)
- **Ignore \*text, even "quotes", inside asterisks\*** - TTS will not play any text within `*asterisks*`, even "quotes" (internal variable name = `narrate_dialogues_only`)
- *having both "only narrate quotes" and "ignore asterisks" checkboxes both checked will result in the TTS only reading "quotes" which are not in asterisks, and ignoring everything else.*
- **Narrate only the translated text** - this will make the TTS only narrate the translated text.
- **Apply regex** - applies a provided regex pattern to the text before sending it to the TTS provider. Useful for removing unwanted parts from the input text, such as emojis or non-native language characters that the TTS engine doesn't handle well.

Given the example text: `*Cohee approaches you with a faint "nya"* "Good evening, senpai", she says.`
Here's a table showing how the text will be modified based on the boolean states of **Ignore \*text, even "quotes", inside asterisks\*** and **Only narrate "quotes"**:

| **Ignore \*text, even "quotes", inside asterisks\*** 	 | **Only narrate "quotes"**	 | **Output**                                                                |
|:-------------------------------------------------------|:---------------------------|:--------------------------------------------------------------------------| 
| Disabled                                               | 	Disabled	                 | Cohee approaches you with a faint "nya" "Good evening, senpai", she says. |
| Disabled                                               | Enabled	                   | "nya"... "Good evening, senpai"                                           |
| Enabled	                                               | Disabled	                  | "Good evening, senpai", she says.                                         |
| Enabled	                                               | Enabled	                   | "Good evening, senpai"                                                    |

### Sliders

These will change depending on the API you select.

### Buttons

- **Apply** - this must be clicked after setting a TTS API and after editing the voice map.
- **Refresh** - reloads the list of voices from the selected TTS API.
- **Available voices** - loads a popup with all voices available for your selected API, and lets you preview them with sample dialogues.

## Using TTS

1. Click the "Enable" checkbox, or nothing will ever happen.
2. Click the "Auto-generation" checkbox if you want the TTS to start automatically every time a new message arrives in chat.
3. Optionally, click the megaphone icon inside the top-right of any message to playback on demand.
4. Click the lower right "Stop" button (found inside the wand menu) to stop any playback.

### Voice Map

You must provide a voice map for the TTS to use, otherwise, it won't know what voices should be used for each character. To setup the voice map, first open a chat with a character that you'd like to assign a voice to and/or select a user persona to assign a voice to, then select a voice listed by a TTS provider from the dropdown. If you don't see a list of voices and/or characters, make sure that your TTS provider is configured correctly and click "Refresh". Some providers (like OpenAI-compatible or NovelAI) require you to populate the voice list manually.