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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Babytalk: Offline speech to text and text to speech on ESP32

Optimized ESP32-S3/P4 fully offline speech to text and text to speech system for Micropython and AtomVM, featuring a finetuned STT model for noisy environments, plus a data generation/field capture/model finetuning framework. Includes high performance 4/8bit int kernels for Xtensa/RiscV PIE vector u

Babytalk is an offline speech recognition and synthesis system designed for ESP32-S3/P4 microcontrollers running Micropython or AtomVM. It provides speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities optimized for noisy… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1

    Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    A TTS model capable of generating ultra-realistic dialogue in one pass. - nari-labs/dia

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Luke from ElevenLabs here. We just released Scribe Realtime v2, our new real-time Speech to Text model. We rebuilt it from the ground up around a new architecture that uses predictive transcription – it anticipates the next likely word before it’s spoken. That makes it both fast (around 150 ms latency) and highly accurate. Scribe v2 Realtime outperforms every low latency transcription model across 30 commonly used EU and Asian languages – 93.5% accuracy, compared to Gemini 2.5 Flash (91.4%), GPT-4o MiniTranscribe (90.7%), and Deepgram Nova 3 (85%). It supports 90+ languages including…

    2025 · elevenlabs.io · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hi HN, OpenAI recently released a model for automatic speech recognition called Whisper [0]. I decided to reimplement the inference of the model from scratch using C/C++. To achieve this I implemented a minimalistic tensor library in C and ported the high-level architecture of the model in C++. The entire code is less than 8000 lines of code and is contained in just 2 source files without any third-party dependencies. The Github project is here: https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp With this implementation I can very easily build and run the model - “make…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Botium Speech Processing. Contribute to codeforequity-at/botium-speech-processing development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    MARS5 TTS▲489

    Open-source, insanely prosodic text-to-speech model

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hi HN! Last year the project I launched here got a lot of good feedback on creating speech to speech AI on the ESP32. Recently I revamped the whole stack, iterated on that feedback and made our project fully open-source—all of the client, hardware, firmware code. This Github repo turns an ESP32-S3 into a realtime AI speech companion using the OpenAI Realtime API, Arduino WebSockets, Deno Edge Functions, and a full-stack web interface. You can talk to your own custom AI character, and it responds instantly. I couldn't find a resource that helped set up a reliable, secure websocket (WSS) AI…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Build Powerful Voice Agents

    2025 · openai.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9
    Ztalk.ai▲450

    Real-time voice translation

    2025 · ztalk.ai · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    The most expressive Text to Speech model ever

    2025 · elevenlabs.io · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey there, I’m Brian. I've been shipping conversational models over here at Tavus for the past two years. I want to tell you about our new audio-understanding model: Sparrow-2! It’s a new category of model and a unique new approach to conversational audio. Earlier this year we launched Sparrow-1, (at the time) our SoTA turn taking model. Since our Sparrow-1 launch, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to humans talking and trying to really understand how people know when to talk, when to listen, and when to wait. I’ve also been hunting down failure modes of the current SoTA models. And while…

    2024 · tavus.io · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    Anytalk▲316

    Real-time video and audio translation app

    2024 · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Transform any generated texts into audio right in ChatGPT

    2023 · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Have a natural, spoken conversation with AI! Contribute to KoljaB/RealtimeVoiceChat development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Fast, accurate STT for production-grade voice agents

    May 2026 · ringg.ai · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    The fastest generative AI Text-to-Speech API

    2023 · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    WhisperFusion builds upon the capabilities of open source tools WhisperLive and WhisperSpeech to provide a seamless conversations with an AI chatbot.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hey HN, I built superwhisper out of frustration with the native dictation capabilities of macOS. Inaccurate, required manual punctuation, didnt activate in some contexts or would have audio capture issues. I wanted a replacement that worked offline, had cross language support, was configurable and worked in any application. Under the hood the app is using whisper.cpp, which runs really well on the Apple Silicon chips. You can use the base and standard size models for free, larger models sizes and languages other than english are paid. Let me know what you think! For context, I launched this…

    2023 · superwhisper.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19
    Dictatofree tier, from $20.82/mo▲93

    I built a macOS dictation app where everything runs on-device. Transcription, auto-correct, translation. No audio or text leaves your machine. It ships with 4 transcription engines you can swap between: WhisperKit (99 languages), NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B (25 European languages, fastest of the bunch), Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (30 languages), and Apple Speech on macOS 26+. They all run through CoreML/Metal. Whisper is the most versatile, Parakeet wins on raw latency for European languages, Qwen3 does better with CJK. I went with a protocol-based architecture so you pick the engine that fits your…

    Feb 2026 · dicta.to · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Next-Gen Speech-to-Text with Unmatched Performance

    2023 · deepgram.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21
    Sayline▲83

    I built a voice dictation app for macOS mostly because I was tired of how awful Siri is and I didn't want to pay a subscription for cloud tools. The app uses NVIDIA's Parakeet v3 (TDT) as the primary engine. Inference is handled by the FluidAudio library. It's insanely fast on M-series chips. For Intel users, I added local Whisper support ranging from Tiny up to Large v3 Turbo (quantized to save space). The interesting part was the AI integration. I originally tried to pipeline the ASR output into Apple's Intelligence Foundation Model. It was a nightmare, because the content moderation…

    Jan 2026 · sayline.app · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Children’s Speech Recognition Technology (Offline)

    2018 · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Real-time text-to-speech model you can self-host

    May 2026 · kugelaudio.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Talk like a human with your ChatGPT voice assistant

    2023 · stork.ai · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →