Demos narrated in English now speak with Kokoro, a small open voice model that runs on any machine without a graphics card and sounds far more natural than Piper, the previous default. Kokoro speaks no German, so German narration with the same setting is spoken by Piper, which now pauses after every sentence instead of running sentences together. Anyone who saved Piper as their voice keeps it; Kokoro is one click away in the demo settings, with a button to hear it first.
Kokoro becomes the default demo voice for English
Shared by Daniel Sadilek on November 6, 2026
Addendum of Nov 6 at 21:01
Kokoro checked on Linux, macOS and Windows
A new check installs Obeya's local demo voices from scratch on each platform and has each speak a sample sentence; the build now runs it on Linux, Windows and macOS. It found that Kokoro failed when Obeya's home lay in a very deep folder, which is fixed: Kokoro now works whatever the length of that path.