# Piper TTS vs SuperClonica: tiny devices or custom voices Updated 2026-10-23 Piper is a fast, local neural text-to-speech engine, known as the voice of Home Assistant and as a speech option in the NVDA screen reader. Its voices are trained with VITS and exported to ONNX, and the original project was optimized for the Raspberry Pi 4. In October 2025 the original repository was archived; development continues in OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl under the Open Home Foundation. SuperClonica also runs speech locally, with a different focus: Supertonic 3 voices as single JSON files, a catalog of author voices and voices made to order. Piper is not in our comparison table, so this page sticks to the facts from its official repositories and says where each one fits. ## How Piper works Each Piper voice is a separate ONNX model with a JSON config, trained for one language. Piper embeds espeak-ng to turn text into phonemes. The current package installs with pip install piper-tts and comes with a command-line tool, a Python API, an HTTP server and a C/C++ library; GPU acceleration through CUDA is optional. The voice list covers 39 languages, from Arabic and Catalan to Vietnamese and Welsh, including Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. Japanese and Korean are not on it. ## Licenses: the engine and each voice The current engine, piper1-gpl, is under GPL-3.0; the archived original was MIT. That matters if you embed the library in a closed product. Voices carry their own terms: the voice list asks you to read each voice's MODEL_CARD, warns that some voices have restrictive licenses and says Piper is intended for personal use and speech research. Supertonic 3 uses OpenRAIL-M, one royalty-free license for the model with a list of prohibited uses. Voices bought on SuperClonica are for your own projects and may not be resold. ## A new voice: training for Piper or for SuperClonica Piper does not clone from a short clip. A new voice means training on a dataset of recordings with transcripts. The official guide recommends fine-tuning from an existing checkpoint; most official voices were trained on 24–48 GB cards, and users report success with 8 GB of VRAM. On SuperClonica a clean recording of 5 to 10 seconds with its exact transcript is enough to start. Your own NVIDIA GPU works as the trainer, you compare checkpoints, and the finished JSON downloads free. Without a GPU, commission the voice from an author or pick a ready voice with demos from the catalog. ## Speed and hardware Piper was built for small devices, and that is its strongest point. We have not benchmarked it and do not rate it in our table. Supertonic 3 needs a base model of about 400 MB plus the engine. Its usual targets are desktops, laptops, servers and browsers through ONNX Runtime Web; we have no measurements on a Raspberry Pi. On a desktop 8-core CPU we estimate SuperClonica at 6.4–9.7× faster than real time, and the engine is on average 61% faster than the standard Supertonic 3 client on CPU. ## When Piper is the better choice SuperClonica fits when you want a voice that Piper's list does not have, Japanese or Korean speech, or a voice commissioned for your project. Choose Piper for: - Raspberry Pi and other small devices, smart home assistants and Home Assistant setups. - Languages Supertonic 3 does not cover, such as Catalan, Welsh, Farsi, Kazakh, Nepali, Swahili or Chinese. - A C/C++ library or a ready HTTP server for an existing system. - Projects that are fine with GPL-3.0 and with the license of the chosen voice. ## More on text to speech - [Text-to-speech that runs on your own computer](https://superclonica.com/en/text-to-speech) - [Supertonic vs SuperClonica: same model, faster and cleaner](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/supertonic) - [Fish Audio and Fish Speech vs SuperClonica](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/fish-audio) - [OmniVoice vs SuperClonica: more languages or more speed](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/omnivoice) - [Qwen3-TTS vs SuperClonica for local text-to-speech](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/qwen3-tts) - [VoxCPM 2 vs SuperClonica: studio sound or CPU speed](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/voxcpm) - [F5-TTS vs SuperClonica: zero-shot cloning or fast CPU speech](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/f5-tts) - [An offline alternative to ElevenLabs](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/elevenlabs) - [Kokoro TTS vs SuperClonica: two small models for local speech](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/kokoro) - [Coqui XTTS-v2 vs SuperClonica: a Coqui TTS alternative](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/xtts) - [Chatterbox TTS vs SuperClonica: instant cloning or a trained voice file](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/chatterbox) ## Text-to-speech guides - [How to convert text to speech offline on your computer](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/offline-text-to-speech) - [Voice cloning: how to get a voice that sounds like a recording](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/voice-cloning) - [The best free text-to-speech models for local use in 2026](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/best-free-tts-models) - [Text to speech for videos, audiobooks, games and apps](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/text-to-speech-for-videos) - [Supertonic 3 voices: where to get custom voices and how to use them](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/supertonic-3-voices) - [Text to speech in Python: offline, free and with natural voices](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/python-text-to-speech) - [Self-hosted text-to-speech API in Docker](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/text-to-speech-api-docker) ## Frequently asked questions ### Is Piper TTS still maintained? The original rhasspy/piper repository was archived in October 2025. Development moved to OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl, which publishes the piper-tts package; the Open Home Foundation is looking for maintainers. ### Can Piper clone a voice? Not from a short clip. You train or fine-tune a voice on a GPU from a transcribed dataset. SuperClonica also trains voices, from a 5- to 10-second recording, or an author can make one for you to order. ### Does Piper support Japanese or Korean? Not in the official voice list. Supertonic 3 voices speak both, along with 29 other languages; Chinese is the gap on the Supertonic 3 side. ### Can I use Piper voices commercially? Check two things: the GPL-3.0 license of the engine and the MODEL_CARD of each voice, since some voices have restrictive terms. Supertonic 3 is OpenRAIL-M, and voices bought on SuperClonica may not be resold. - [Browse voices with demos](https://superclonica.com/en/explore) - [Install the engine](https://superclonica.com/en/superclonica) ## Sources - [Piper repository (OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl)](https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl) - [Piper voices and languages](https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl/blob/main/docs/VOICES.md) - [Training Piper voices](https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl/blob/main/docs/TRAINING.md) - [Original Piper README (archived repository)](https://github.com/rhasspy/piper/blob/077a6be6000bee218c27b18efa0e709de95d6d2f/README.md) - [Supertonic 3 model card](https://huggingface.co/supertone-oss-archive/supertonic-3) - [SuperClonica](https://superclonica.com/en/) - [AI voice catalog for text to speech](https://superclonica.com/en/explore) - [Custom voice commissions for Supertonic 3](https://superclonica.com/en/requests) - [How it works: voices, local speech, training](https://superclonica.com/en/guide) - [Install the faster Supertonic 3 engine](https://superclonica.com/en/superclonica) - [About us: speech synthesis enthusiasts](https://superclonica.com/en/about) - [Contacts, support and voice complaints](https://superclonica.com/en/contacts) - [Privacy policy: what data we keep](https://superclonica.com/en/privacy) - [Terms of use: rules for buyers and authors](https://superclonica.com/en/terms) - [Text to speech](https://superclonica.com/en/text-to-speech)