Sahil Mahendrakar · Tiny multi-voice TTS

Paradee-8M-v1.2

Paradee-8M-v1.2 is an update to Sahil Mahendrakar's small text-to-speech model, which is distilled from Kokoro-82M. It adds three voices to the original af_heart, giving four (two American, two British) in the same 8.5 MB file, with file size and speed unchanged from v1.1. On 200 held-out sentences, UTMOS scores for Paradee against Kokoro are 4.40 vs 4.52 (af_heart), 4.06 vs 4.41 (bf_isabella), 4.32 vs 4.47 (am_puck) and 4.18 vs 4.32 (bm_fable). Whisper-measured word error rates are close to Kokoro's, between 5.4% and 5.8%. The af_heart UTMOS score is 4.40, against 4.39 in v1.1. Each half of the model now has a small table holding one voice vector per voice, and the chosen voice selects the row, while everything else is shared. The phonemizer was also updated to use British phonemes for British voices. Training started from the v1.1 weights and continued on Kokoro reading 12,000 sentences in each voice. It is available on Hugging Face and GitHub, and the Python package defaults to v1.2, with v1.1 still available. It is also the light voice in the Chickadee Chrome extension. No licence or release date is stated.