AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Silero VAD
One voice detector to rule them all
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Silero VAD launched in 2021; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1IB
I built a voice agent from scratch that averages ~400ms end-to-end latency (phone stop → first syllable). That’s with full STT → LLM → TTS in the loop, clean barge-ins, and no precomputed responses. What moved the needle: Voice is a turn-taking problem, not a transcription problem. VAD alone fails; you need semantic end-of-turn detection. The system reduces to one loop: speaking vs listening. The two transitions - cancel instantly on barge-in, respond instantly on end-of-turn - define the experience. STT → LLM → TTS must stream. Sequential pipelines are dead on arrival for natural…
Mar 2026 · ntik.me · its alternatives →
- 2KT
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 →
- 3TN
Kitten TTS (https://github.com/KittenML/KittenTTS) is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We had a thread last year here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44807868. Today we're releasing three new models with 80M, 40M and 14M parameters. The largest model (80M) has the highest quality. The 14M variant reaches new SOTA in expressivity among similar sized models, despite being <25MB in size. This release is a major upgrade from the previous one and supports English text-to-speech applications in…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4

- 5

- 6

- 7MO
I wanted to share our new speech to text model, and the library to use them effectively. We're a small startup (six people, sub-$100k monthly GPU budget) so I'm proud of the work the team has done to create streaming STT models with lower word-error rates than OpenAI's largest Whisper model. Admittedly Large v3 is a couple of years old, but we're near the top the HF OpenASR leaderboard, even up against Nvidia's Parakeet family. Anyway, I'd love to get feedback on the models and software, and hear about what people might build with it.
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8BY
Voice Activity Detection (VAD) is a crucial component for Voice AI, enabling more natural and efficient interactions. TEN VAD is an open-source solution designed to supercharge your Voice AI Agents with lightning-fast, human-like conversations! TEN VAD offers some key advantages: ONNX Support: Deploy on virtually any platform or hardware architecture! This means greater flexibility and easier integration into your existing systems. Superior Detection Accuracy: Experience noticeable improvements in voice detection, leading to fewer errors and more reliable performance. Smaller & Faster: Enjoy…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9

Highly expressive and natural speech generation model
2025 · microsoft.ai · its alternatives →
- 10

Production ASR for noisy multilingual audio
Apr 2026 · microsoft.ai · its alternatives →
- 11

Multilingual TTS model with realistic and expressive speech
Mar 2026 · mistral.ai · its alternatives →
- 12OS
Our goal with this project is to build a completely open source, state of the art turn detection model that can be used in any voice AI application. I've been experimenting with LLM voice conversations since GPT-4 was first released. (There's a previous front page Show HN about Pipecat, the open source voice AI orchestration framework I work on. [1]) It's been almost two years, and for most of that time, I've been expecting that someone would "solve" turn detection. We all built initial, pretty good 80/20 versions of turn detection on top of VAD (voice activity detection) models. And…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13

- 14
Vois 2.0▲105The ElevenLabs alternative with unlimited generation
21d ago · vois.so · its alternatives →
- 15

- 16

- 17

Next-Gen Speech-to-Text with Unmatched Performance
2023 · its alternatives →
- 18

- 19
VoxCPM2▲110Open-source 48kHz TTS with voice design and cloning
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20

- 21

- 22VA
Voxos is an open-source desktop voice assistant that aims to put Clippy to shame while supporting new desktop workflows powered by LLMs. Tired of copy and pasting ChatGPT responses between your web browser and IDE? Does your copilot not quite do what you need it to do? I invite you to give Voxos a try and maybe even become a contributor!
2024 · gitlab.com · its alternatives →
- 23AO
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24

Also compare
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 →