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ckochandClaude Opus 4.8 a622e58792 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

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AIVoices_HA

Custom Piper text-to-speech voices for Home Assistant.

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.

Locate the Piper data directory where custom voices are stored. For the official Piper add-on this is the share folder, typically:
```
/share/piper/
```
Copy both files for each voice you want into that directory:
```
en_us-cathy-medium.onnx
en_us-cathy-medium.onnx.json
```
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:

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.