Model reference · open weights
Kokoro is an open-weight audio or speech model from hexgrad, listed in the AxForge catalogue. AxForge can bring it up on EU-owned hardware for you on request — with the licence handled where one is required.
About
Kokoro is an open-weight TTS model with 82 million parameters. Despite its lightweight architecture, it delivers comparable quality to larger models while being significantly faster and more cost-efficient. With Apache-licensed weights, Kokoro can be deployed anywhere from production environments to personal projects. 🐈 GitHub: https://github.com/hexgrad/kokoro 🚀 Demo: https://hf.co/spaces/hexgrad/Kokoro-TTS [!NOTE] As of April 2025, the market rate of Kokoro served over API is under $1 per million characters of text input, or under $0.06 per hour of audio output. (On average, 1000 characters of input is about 1 minute of output.) Sources: ArtificialAnalysis/Replicate at 65 cents per M chars and DeepInfra at 80 cents per M chars. This is an Apache-licensed model, and Kokoro has been deployed in numerous projects and commercial APIs. We welcome the deployment of the model in real use cases. [!CAUTION] Fake websites like kokorottsaicom (snapshot: https://archive.ph/nRRnk) and kokorottsnet (snapshot: https://archive.ph/60opa) are likely scams masquerading under the banner of a popular model. Any website containing "kokoro" in its root domain (e.g. kokorottsaicom, kokorottsnet) is NOT owned by and NOT affiliated with this model page or its author, and attempts to imply otherwise are red flags. - Releases - Usage - EVAL.md ↗️ - SAMPLES.md ↗️ - VOICES.md ↗️ - Model Facts - Training Details - Creative Commons Attribution - Acknowledgements Releases Usage You can run this basic cell on Google Colab. Listen to samples. For more languages and details, see Advanced Usage. Under the hood, kokoro uses misaki, a G2P library at https://github.com/hexgrad/misaki Model Facts Architecture: - StyleTTS 2: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07691 - ISTFTNet: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02395 - Decoder only: no diffusion, no encoder release Architected by: Li et al @ https://github.com/yl4579/StyleTTS2 Trained by: @rzvzn on Discord Languages: Multiple Model SHA256 Hash: 496dba118d1a58f5f3db2efc88dbdc216e0483fc89fe6e47ee1f2c53f18ad1e4 Training Details Data: Kokoro was trained exclusively on permissive/non-copyrighted audio data and IPA phoneme labels. Examples of permissive/non-copyrighted aud
Summarised from the published model card. Read the full card on the HuggingFace links below.
Specifications
| Maker | hexgrad |
|---|---|
| Type | Audio & music |
| Variants | 1 |
| Based on | yl4579/StyleTTS2-LJSpeech |
| Released | 2024-12-26 |
| Popularity | 11.8M downloads / month |
| Likes | 6,779 |
| Licence | Open weights |
How it works
Variants
Open weights ship in several sizes and precisions. One page, all the variants — pick the one that fits your GPU. VRAM figures are estimates from model size.
| Variant | Params | Precision | VRAM | Fits 16 GB | Weights |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kokoro-82M | — | BF16 | — | — | Weights ↗ |
Using it via the API
Once AxForge deploys kokoro for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (kokoro below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)
$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/audio/transcriptions \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \ -F model="kokoro" -F file=@audio.mp3
Licence
Open weights under apache-2.0 — commercial use is permitted. Deploy it on AxForge EU hardware on request. Read the licence ↗