speakturbo - Talk to your Claude!

Give your agent the ability to speak to you real-time. Ultra-fast text-to-speech with ~90ms latency and 8 built-in voices.

Quick Start

Play immediately - you should hear "Hello world" through your speakers

speakturbo "Hello world"

Output: ⚡ 92ms → ▶ 93ms → ✓ 1245ms

Verify it's working by saving to file

speakturbo "Hello world" -o test.wav ls -lh test.wav # Should show ~50-100KB file

Output explained: ⚡ = first audio received, ▶ = playback started, ✓ = done

First Run

The first execution takes 2-5 seconds while the daemon starts and loads the model into memory. Subsequent calls are ~90ms to first sound.

First run (slow - daemon starting)

speakturbo "Starting up" # ~2-5 seconds

Second run (fast - daemon already running)

speakturbo "Now I'm fast" # ~90ms

Usage

Basic - plays immediately (default voice: alba)

speakturbo "Hello world"

Save to file (no audio playback)

speakturbo "Hello" -o output.wav

Save to specific file

speakturbo "Goodbye" -o goodbye.wav

Quiet mode (suppress status messages, still plays audio)

speakturbo "Hello" -q

List available voices

speakturbo --list-voices

Available Voices Voice Type alba Female (default) marius Male javert Male jean Male fantine Female cosette Female eponine Female azelma Female Performance Metric Value Time to first sound ~90ms (daemon warm) First run 2-5s (daemon startup) Real-time factor ~4x faster Sample rate 24kHz mono Architecture speakturbo (Rust CLI, 2.2MB) │ │ HTTP streaming (port 7125) ▼ speakturbo-daemon (Python + pocket-tts) │ │ Model in memory, auto-shutdown after 1hr idle ▼ Audio playback (rodio)

Text Input Encoding: UTF-8 Quotes in text: Use escaping: speakturbo "She said \"hello\"" Long text: Supported, streams as it generates Exit Codes Code Meaning 0 Success (audio played/saved) 1 Error (daemon connection failed, invalid args) When to Use

Use speakturbo when:

You need instant audio feedback (~90ms) Speed matters more than voice variety Built-in voices are sufficient

Use speak instead when:

You need custom voice cloning (Morgan Freeman, etc.) → speak "text" --voice ~/.chatter/voices/morgan_freeman.wav You need emotion tags like [laugh], [sigh] Quality/variety matters more than speed

See the speak skill documentation for full usage.

Troubleshooting

No audio plays:

Check daemon is running

curl http://127.0.0.1:7125/health

Expected:

Verify by saving to file and playing manually

speakturbo "test" -o /tmp/test.wav afplay /tmp/test.wav # macOS aplay /tmp/test.wav # Linux

Daemon won't start:

Check port availability

lsof -i :7125

Manually kill and restart

pkill -f "daemon_streaming" speakturbo "test" # Auto-restarts daemon

First run is slow: This is expected. The daemon needs to load the ~100MB model into memory. Subsequent calls will be fast (~90ms).

Daemon Management

The daemon auto-starts on first use and auto-shuts down after 1 hour idle.

Check status