OpenVoice: audio generator — what it does and what you need to run it

OpenVoice is an open-source speech generator from the MyShell team. It tackles the text-to-speech task and, as described by the authors, belongs to the class of audio foundation models. The primary use case is voice synthesis with the ability to transfer timbre based on a sample, without additional training for a specific speaker.

What it does

The authors describe OpenVoice as a model for voice cloning and zero-shot text-to-speech. This means the system can reproduce text in a voice whose characteristics are defined by a short speech sample. In the repository, the project is tagged with text-to-speech, tts, voice-clone, and zero-shot-tts.

The model is published in two places: the code repository and the OpenVoiceV2 weights page on Hugging Face. The total size of the weight files is 0.1 GB, and the largest individual file is also 0.1 GB.

What you need to run it

The code is written in Python. The repository was created in November 2023, with the latest code change dated April 2025. The code license is MIT, and the weights license is MIT. This permits use and modification provided the license terms are preserved.

The authors do not specify hardware requirements, system RAM, or a specific Python version in the fact sheet.

Who it suits

OpenVoice may be useful for those working with speech synthesis who want access to the source code and model weights. The permissive MIT license allows integrating the model into your own projects and research pipelines.

The project is unlikely to suit those looking for a ready-made application with an interface: the fact sheet lists only the repository, the model page, and the research site. It is also worth noting that the authors do not provide measured synthesis quality metrics or compute requirements.

OpenVoice is an open codebase and a set of weights for speech synthesis with voice transfer. Practical applicability can be assessed after running it on your own hardware and testing it on specific tasks.