tts-router — Local TTS Router for Apple Silicon

A CLI that manages and serves multiple TTS models locally on Apple Silicon (MLX).

Models are downloaded from HuggingFace Hub and served via OpenAI + DashScope compatible APIs.

Prerequisites

• macOS with Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4)
• uv installed — see https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/

(e.g. brew install uv or via the official installer)

• ffmpeg installed (brew install ffmpeg)

Install

# From PyPI (requires --prerelease=allow due to mlx-audio upstream dep)
uvx --prerelease=allow tts-router list

# Or install with pip
pip install tts-router

Commands

tts-router list — Show available models

tts-router list

tts-router pull — Download model weights

tts-router pull qwen3-tts
tts-router pull kokoro

Models are cached in ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/. No need to re-download.

tts-router serve — Start the TTS API server

# Default: qwen3-tts on port 8091
tts-router serve

# Custom model and port
tts-router serve --model kokoro --port 9000

The server requires models to be pulled first.

tts-router say — Synthesize speech from CLI

tts-router say "Hello world" -o hello.wav
tts-router say "Hello" --voice Vivian --model kokoro -o out.wav

Available Models

Quick Start for Agent

# 1. Pull the default model
tts-router pull qwen3-tts

# 2. Start the server
tts-router serve

# 3. Generate speech (OpenAI format)
curl -X POST http://localhost:8091/v1/audio/speech \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"input": "Hello world", "voice": "Vivian"}' \
  --output output.wav

API Endpoints (when serving)

Advanced Use Cases

For more complex workflows, read the relevant reference file:

• Clone a voice from any URL (YouTube, Bilibili, podcast, direct audio link) →

read references/voice-cloning.md

• Use tts-router as a TTS provider in OpenClaw →

read references/openclaw.md