Add cathy, cynda, and james Piper voices for Home Assistant

Three medium-quality en-US single-speaker Piper TTS voices, each with its .onnx model and .onnx.json config, plus README install instructions. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-06-12 09:33:42 -04:00
commit a622e58792
8 changed files with 1564 additions and 0 deletions
@@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
+# AIVoices_HA
+
+Custom [Piper](https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl) text-to-speech voices for [Home Assistant](https://www.home-assistant.io/).
+
+These are medium-quality, single-speaker English (`en-US`) neural voices trained for use with Home Assistant's local TTS engine.
+
+## Voices
+
+| Voice | Files | Language | Sample rate | Quality |
+|-------|-------|----------|-------------|---------|
+| **cathy** | `en_us-cathy-medium.onnx` + `.onnx.json` | en-US | 22050 Hz | medium |
+| **cynda** | `en_us-cynda-medium.onnx` + `.onnx.json` | en-US | 22050 Hz | medium |
+| **james** | `en_us-james-medium.onnx` + `.onnx.json` | en-US | 22050 Hz | medium |
+
+Each voice consists of two files that must stay together:
+
+- `*.onnx` — the trained model weights
+- `*.onnx.json` — the voice configuration (phoneme map, sample rate, inference settings)
+
+## Installation (Home Assistant)
+
+These voices work with the **Piper** add-on / [wyoming-piper](https://github.com/rhasspy/wyoming-piper).
+
+1. Locate the Piper data directory where custom voices are stored. For the
+   official **Piper** add-on this is the share folder, typically:
+
+   ```
+   /share/piper/
+   ```
+
+2. Copy **both** files for each voice you want into that directory:
+
+   ```
+   en_us-cathy-medium.onnx
+   en_us-cathy-medium.onnx.json
+   ```
+
+3. Restart the Piper add-on. Then in Home Assistant go to
+   **Settings → Voice assistants → (your assistant) → Text-to-speech**
+   and select the new voice.
+
+> Tip: If a voice does not appear, confirm the `.onnx` and `.onnx.json`
+> filenames match exactly and that both files are present.
+
+## Testing a voice locally
+
+With Piper installed you can render a sample to a WAV file:
+
+```bash
+echo "Hello from Home Assistant." | \
+  piper --model en_us-cathy-medium.onnx --output_file sample.wav
+```
+
+## License
+
+The licensing of a trained Piper voice depends on the dataset it was trained
+on. Add a `LICENSE` file describing the terms that apply to these models and
+their training data before distributing them.