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TTS Models

Tryll synthesizes speech through two engines:

  • SherpaOnnx hosts Supertonic 3 and Pocket TTS.
  • LlamaCpp hosts Orpheus and Maya1, plus a shared SNAC 24 kHz decoder.

This page is the authoritative list of which voices the Tryll server ships, which families it can load, and why the rest are out of reach.

Short version: Tryll ships an eSpeak-free Sherpa-ONNX build so the server can be redistributed inside a proprietary game. That choice makes two Sherpa families available — Supertonic 3 and Pocket TTS — and puts the rest of the Sherpa zoo out of reach. Separately, two llama.cpp SNAC voices — Orpheus 3B FT (Q4_K_M) and Maya1 3B (i1-Q4_K_M) — are public catalog entries. Identity and delivery use tts_voice_description / tts_delivery_instruction; [emotion] is not supported syntax.

Heavier SNAC quants (Orpheus 3B FT (Q8), Maya1 3B (Q8), Maya1 3B (Q4_K_M)) stay audience: "internal" and are not a public default.

For the catalog file format these models are declared in, see Model Management. For the node parameters that select a voice at runtime, see TTS and Voice Output.

Shipped voices

The four entries below are in the default models.json, are downloaded on demand, and are selected with the tts_model_name parameter on GenerateAndSpeak or Speak. The engine is taken from the catalog — you do not pick Sherpa vs. llama.cpp in Project Settings. See Choose where models run.

Catalog name Engine Family Voices Languages Voice cloning Weights license
Supertonic 3 (int8) sherpa-onnx supertonic 10 built-in styles (speaker_id 0–9) 31, via tts_lang No OpenRAIL-M (attribution + use restrictions)
Pocket TTS (int8) sherpa-onnx pocket Single-speaker (speaker_id must stay 0) English Yes — zero-shot from a reference WAV (tts_voice) CC-BY-4.0 (attribution)
Orpheus 3B FT (Q4_K_M) llama-cpp orpheus 8 named presets (speaker_id 0–7: Tara, Leah, Jess, Leo, Dan, Mia, Zac, Zoe) English No Llama 3 Community License
Maya1 3B (i1-Q4_K_M) llama-cpp maya1 2 catalog presets (speaker_id 0–1) or a natural-language description English No — describe the voice instead Apache-2.0

Both SNAC voices pull a shared SNAC 24 kHz decoder (~50 MB) the first time either parent is downloaded. Deleting one parent does not delete the decoder.

Pick Supertonic 3 when you want multiple distinct voices, non-English speech, or the lowest latency. Pick Pocket TTS when a character needs a specific voice you can supply as an audio sample — see Clone a Voice. Pick Orpheus for named English speakers plus inline tags such as <laugh>. Pick Maya1 when you want to brief a voice in natural language (tts_voice_description) and steer delivery per call (tts_delivery_instruction).

Attribution is required

None of these weights are public domain.

  • Supertonic 3 is OpenRAIL-M (attribution plus use-based restrictions — no impersonation or harmful use).
  • Pocket TTS is CC-BY-4.0 (attribution).
  • Orpheus weights are a Llama 3 derivative and inherit the Llama 3 Community License; the Orpheus inference code is Apache-2.0.
  • Maya1 weights are Apache-2.0.
  • The shared SNAC decoder is MIT (hubertsiuzdak/snac).

If you ship a voice in a game, include the model attribution in your credits or third-party notices. The engine code itself (Sherpa-ONNX, ONNX Runtime, llama.cpp) is permissively licensed and imposes no such obligation.

Voice controls by family

These are four different knobs. Do not encode identity or delivery as a spoken [emotion] prefix — that syntax is not supported. Model-native <tag> tokens that a catalog lists may reach the synthesizer; unknown tags are stripped from the audio copy only and do not rewrite history.

Control Supertonic 3 Pocket TTS Orpheus Maya1
speaker_id 0–9 (style index) Must stay 0 0–7 (named preset) 0–1 (catalog preset)
tts_voice Ignored Reference WAV Ignored Ignored
tts_voice_description Unsupported Unsupported Unsupported Stable identity (overrides speaker_id when set)
tts_delivery_instruction Unsupported Unsupported Unsupported Sustained delivery for this call
tts_lang 31 languages Ignored (English) Ignored (English) Ignored (English)
speed 0.1–3.0 0.1–3.0 1.0 only 1.0 only
Inline <tag> tokens — — <laugh>, <chuckle>, <sigh>, <cough>, <sniffle>, <groan>, <yawn>, <gasp> <laugh>, <giggle>, <sigh>, <gasp>, <angry>, <whisper>, <cry>, <scream>

A control the loaded model does not advertise fails rather than being silently ignored. Orpheus and Maya1 reject a speed other than 1.0.

Maya1 catalog presets are starting points, not the only voices:

  • 0 — Male, 30s, American
  • 1 — Female, 30s, American

Set tts_voice_description to something like "Realistic female voice in the 30s with an American accent. Normal pitch, warm timbre, conversational pacing." and the description replaces the preset. Pair it with tts_delivery_instruction (for example whisper or angry) for this-call delivery; leave it empty for neutral.

Family support matrix

Sherpa-ONNX v1.13.2 exposes seven TTS families. Tryll accepts two of them. llama.cpp SNAC families are a separate path.

Family Engine Upstream examples Status in Tryll Why
Supertonic Sherpa-ONNX Supertonic 3 ✅ Supported Own tokenizer (unicode_indexer.bin); no eSpeak
Pocket Sherpa-ONNX Pocket TTS (Kyutai) ✅ Supported SentencePiece vocabulary; no eSpeak
Orpheus llama.cpp Orpheus 3B FT ✅ Supported SNAC tokens via llama.cpp; shared ONNX decoder
Maya1 llama.cpp Maya1 3B ✅ Supported Same SNAC engine as Orpheus; description + delivery controls
Kokoro Sherpa-ONNX Kokoro v0.19, v1.0 ❌ Unavailable Requires eSpeak NG — see below
Kitten Sherpa-ONNX KittenTTS nano/micro/mini ❌ Unavailable Requires eSpeak NG — see below
VITS (incl. Piper) Sherpa-ONNX Piper voices, MMS, LJSpeech ❌ Unavailable Piper-style bundles require eSpeak NG. Lexicon-based VITS bundles do not, but the family is not implemented in Tryll.
Matcha Sherpa-ONNX Matcha-Icefall (en, zh) ❌ Unavailable English bundles require eSpeak NG. The Chinese lexicon path does not, but the family is not implemented in Tryll.
ZipVoice Sherpa-ONNX ZipVoice, ZipVoice-Distill ❌ Unavailable No eSpeak requirement, but the family is not implemented in Tryll.

Note the two distinct reasons for the Sherpa gaps. Kokoro and Kitten are blocked by licensing — they cannot be enabled without changing what Tryll redistributes. VITS, Matcha, and ZipVoice are simply not implemented; nothing in principle prevents their eSpeak-free bundles from being added later.

Why eSpeak-dependent families are unavailable

Sherpa-ONNX performs grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for several families with eSpeak NG, which is licensed GPLv3-or-later. Linking it into tryll_server.exe would make the server a combined work under GPLv3 — and because the server payload is bundled inside your game build, that obligation would follow you, your studio, and your publisher.

Tryll therefore builds Sherpa-ONNX with eSpeak NG compiled out entirely. The shipped sherpa-onnx-c-api.dll contains no eSpeak code and the payload contains no espeak-ng-data. The upside is that nothing in the Tryll server imposes a copyleft obligation on your game. The cost is that any voice whose front-end calls eSpeak cannot run, regardless of how the model's own weights are licensed.

This constraint applies to Sherpa-ONNX families only. llama.cpp SNAC voices do not use eSpeak.

A permissive model license is not enough

KittenTTS is the classic trap: its weights are Apache-2.0, which looks unrestricted, but the model is trained on eSpeak phoneme IDs and Sherpa-ONNX's Kitten loader requires a populated espeak-ng-data directory. The permissive headline license does not make the runtime dependency go away. The same reasoning excludes Kokoro, whose loader also hard-requires that directory.

What happens if you try an unsupported family

A Sherpa-ONNX models.json variant whose tts_family is anything other than supertonic or pocket fails when the model is loaded — that is, at CreateAgent time for a graph referencing it, not silently at startup. llama.cpp SNAC families (orpheus, maya1) load when their catalog entries and the shared decoder asset are present.

tts_family value Result
supertonic, pocket Loads normally on Sherpa-ONNX
orpheus, maya1 Loads normally on llama.cpp + the shared SNAC decoder
vits, piper, kokoro, or empty Rejected with an explicit eSpeak/GPLv3 message
Any other Sherpa-ONNX value (kitten, matcha, zipvoice, typos) Rejected as an unknown Sherpa-ONNX family

Those Sherpa-ONNX cases surface as agent-creation failures; see Error Codes. An empty Sherpa-ONNX tts_family is rejected rather than defaulting, because the historical default was VITS.

Adding your own voice

You can add TTS entries to models.json — either a HuggingFace repo or a local path — using the schema in Model Management. For Sherpa-ONNX the constraint is the family, not the source: the bundle must be a Supertonic or Pocket bundle, with the tts_files key set that family expects. llama.cpp SNAC voices use tts_family orpheus or maya1 plus a shared decoder asset (dependencies.snac_decoder).

Sherpa bundles for both supported families are published under csukuangfj on HuggingFace alongside the rest of the Sherpa-ONNX model zoo. A Sherpa bundle from any other family will be rejected at load time even though the catalog entry itself parses.