Audio Gen · Model Guide · 4 min read
F5-TTS
Fast, expressive open-weights voice cloning — reference-audio speech that runs on a consumer GPU.
| Developer | Open source (SWivid) |
|---|---|
| Availability | Open weights |
| Commercial license | MIT — commercial use, modification, and redistribution permitted. The big responsibility sits with you: cloning a voice requires that person's consent, both ethically and legally. |
Basic Information
F5-TTS is one of the strongest open text-to-speech models: a ~336M-parameter flow-matching model that clones a voice from a short reference sample and speaks any text with that voice's character — prosody, pacing, and emotion included. Inference is fast on a consumer GPU and even workable on CPU for short clips.
It is MIT-licensed, fully offline, and integrates with local pipelines (Gradio UI, ComfyUI nodes, API wrappers). Zero-shot cloning quality is the headline: a ten-second sample is enough for a usable voice.
Best use cases
- Private voice cloning and narration entirely offline (with consent of the voice owner)
- Audiobook and article pipelines without cloud per-character pricing
- Custom assistant voices for local AI stacks (pair with Open WebUI-style frontends)
- Multilingual speech with reference-voice accent transfer
Computational Requirements
Tiny: ~0.3 GB of weights; real-time on most GPUs (4 GB is plenty) and feasible on CPU for short clips.
| Configuration | Memory |
|---|---|
| Model size | ~336M parameters (~0.7 GB with vocoder) |
| Comfortable VRAM | ~4 GB |
Commercial license
MIT — commercial use, modification, and redistribution permitted. The big responsibility sits with you: cloning a voice requires that person's consent, both ethically and legally.
Compare the cost of using it
Curious how a hosted model’s bills add up against local hardware? The Local vs Cloud panel does the math for your workload.
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