udayl/NotebookLM-Kokoro_TTS_App

NotebookLM-Kokoro TTS Project

This project uses Kokoro – a lightweight, open-weight TTS model with 82 million parameters – to create a Google NotebookLM style Text-to-Speech application.

Why Kokoro?

• —Non-Proprietary & Open-Source: Kokoro is best in its class as a non-proprietary model, giving you full flexibility to deploy in production environments or personal projects.
• —High Efficiency: Despite its lightweight architecture, Kokoro delivers comparable quality to larger models while being faster and more cost-efficient.
• —Benchmarks: According to benchmarks available on the TTS-Arena page, Kokoro outperforms many closed-source models, making it the ideal choice for open deployments.
• —Easy Integration: With simple pip and Homebrew installation for dependencies like espeak-ng, integration into Python projects is straightforward.

Setup Instructions

Environment Setup

This project uses the uv Python package manager. Follow these steps:

1. 1.Install uv:

   pip install uv

1. 1.Create a new environment named `notebooklm`:

   uv venv

1. 1.Activate the environment:

   source .venv/bin/activate

1. 1.Install Python dependencies:

   pip install "kokoro>=0.9.2" soundfile torch

1. 1.Install espeak-ng (Mac users):

   brew install espeak-ng

Running the Application

Once the environment is set up, run the main TTS script as follows:

python notebook_lm_kokoro.py

This will process the transcript text using Kokoro and output audio segments as WAV files.

Conclusion

Kokoro’s combination of efficiency, quality, and open-access makes it the best non-proprietary TTS model available, as confirmed by recent benchmarks. Enjoy exploring and extending this project!