Backends & voices¶

Bard supports four TTS backends. Use --backend <name> to select one at startup:

Backend	`--backend` value	Type	Notes
OpenAI TTS	`openai`	remote	requires `OPENAI_API_KEY`
ElevenLabs	`elevenlabs`	remote	requires `ELEVENLABS_API_KEY`
Kokoro	`kokoro`	local	free, offline, multilingual (54 voices, 9 languages)
Piper	`piper`	local	free, offline, multilingual

bard --backend kokoro --voice af_heart
bard --backend piper --voice en_US-amy-medium
bard --backend elevenlabs --voice Rachel

Installing local backend models¶

Remote backends (openai, elevenlabs) only need an API key.

Local backends (kokoro, piper) need model files on disk. Bard searches, in order: ~/.local/share/{piper,kokoro}/, then ~/.local/share/bard/{piper,kokoro}/, then the system XDG data dirs, then the legacy ~/.cache/bard/{piper,kokoro}/. Setting BARD_PIPER_MODEL, BARD_KOKORO_MODEL_PATH, or BARD_KOKORO_VOICES_PATH overrides the search.

Piper¶

Use the downloader that ships with piper-tts:

python -m piper.download_voices en_US-amy-medium --data-dir ~/.local/share/piper

Voice catalog: https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices. Any .onnx files in the chosen directory show up under the Voice submenu and in bard --backend piper --list-voices.

For community voices outside the official catalog (e.g. extra French voices hosted on HuggingFace under other users), python -m piper.download_voices will 404 — fetch the two files directly. Each Piper voice is one .onnx plus its sibling .onnx.json:

cd ~/.local/share/piper
HF=https://huggingface.co/csukuangfj/vits-piper-fr_FR-miro-high/resolve/main
curl -LO $HF/fr_FR-miro-high.onnx
curl -LO $HF/fr_FR-miro-high.onnx.json

Voice switching at runtime only sees .onnx files sibling to the currently loaded voice, so keep all voices in the same directory.

Kokoro¶

The upstream package has no downloader, so fetch the two files directly:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/kokoro
curl -L -o ~/.local/share/kokoro/kokoro-v1.0.onnx \
  https://github.com/thewh1teagle/kokoro-onnx/releases/download/model-files-v1.0/kokoro-v1.0.onnx
curl -L -o ~/.local/share/kokoro/voices-v1.0.bin \
  https://github.com/thewh1teagle/kokoro-onnx/releases/download/model-files-v1.0/voices-v1.0.bin

bard --list-backends shows the install command for any local backend whose model files are missing.

Listing backends and voices¶

# Show all registered backends with availability:
bard --list-backends

# List voice IDs for the selected backend:
bard --backend openai --list-voices

# Full metadata table (id / language / gender / model), grouped by language:
bard --backend kokoro --list-voices --verbose

Picking a voice by language¶

Instead of remembering a voice id, you can let bard pick the first one matching a language tag. Useful with multilingual backends like Kokoro:

bard --backend kokoro --language fr      # first French voice
bard --backend kokoro --language pt-BR   # first Brazilian-Portuguese voice

--language is ignored when --voice is also set. The tray and terminal Voice submenus also group entries by language for easier browsing.