Model reference · open weights
Kokoro is an open-weight audio or speech model from hexgrad. AxForge deploys and operates it for you on dedicated EU-owned hardware — with the licence handled where one is required.
Available as managed deployment — configured and operated for you on dedicated EU hardware, quoted per deployment.
What it is
| Maker | hexgrad |
|---|---|
| Type | Audio & music |
| Task | Text→speech |
| Based on | yl4579/StyleTTS2-LJSpeech |
| Released | 2024-12-26 |
| Popularity | 11.8M downloads / month |
| Licence | Open weights |
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 kokorottsai_com (snapshot: https://archive.ph/nRRnk) and kokorotts_net (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. kokorottsai_com, kokorotts_net) is NOT owned by and NOT affiliated with this model page or its author, and attempts to imply otherwise are red flags.
| Model | Published | Training Data | Langs & Voices | SHA256 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| v1.0 | 2025 Jan 27 | Few hundred hrs | 8 & 54 | 496dba11 |
| v0.19 | 2024 Dec 25 | <100 hrs | 1 & 10 | 3b0c392f |
| Training Costs | v0.19 | v1.0 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| in A100 80GB GPU hours | 500 | 500 | 1000 |
| average hourly rate | $0.80/h | $1.20/h | $1/h |
| in USD | $400 | $600 | $1000 |
!pip install -q kokoro>=0.9.2 soundfile
!apt-get -qq -y install espeak-ng > /dev/null 2>&1
from kokoro import KPipeline
from IPython.display import display, Audio
import soundfile as sf
import torch
pipeline = KPipeline(lang_code='a')
text = '''
[Kokoro](/kˈOkəɹO/) 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](/kˈOkəɹO/) can be deployed anywhere from production environments to personal projects.
'''
generator = pipeline(text, voice='af_heart')
for i, (gs, ps, audio) in enumerate(generator):
print(i, gs, ps)
display(Audio(data=audio, rate=24000, autoplay=i==0))
sf.write(f'{i}.wav', audio, 24000)
Under the hood, kokoro uses misaki, a G2P library at https://github.com/hexgrad/misaki
Architecture:
Architected by: Li et al @ https://github.com/yl4579/StyleTTS2
Trained by: @rzvzn on Discord
Languages: Multiple
Model SHA256 Hash: 496dba118d1a58f5f3db2efc88dbdc216e0483fc89fe6e47ee1f2c53f18ad1e4
Data: Kokoro was trained exclusively on permissive/non-copyrighted audio data and IPA phoneme labels. Examples of permissive/non-copyrighted audio include:
Total Dataset Size: A few hundred hours of audio
Total Training Cost: About $1000 for 1000 hours of A100 80GB vRAM
The following CC BY audio was part of the dataset used to train Kokoro v1.0.
| Audio Data | Duration Used | License | Added to Training Set After |
|---|---|---|---|
Koniwa tnc | <1h | CC BY 3.0 | v0.19 / 22 Nov 2024 |
| SIWIS | <11h | CC BY 4.0 | v0.19 / 22 Nov 2024 |
From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.
How it works
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
Create an account — your API key is available in the console. 5M tokens/month currently included with every new account at launch.