Open-Source Text-to-Speech (TTS) Serving in Production: Comparing Kokoro-82M, F5-TTS, StyleTTS 2, and Fish Speech
Deploying open-source text-to-speech (TTS) in production has shifted rapidly over the past year. Where teams previously defaulted to managed cloud APIs like ElevenLabs or OpenAI Audio due to the complexity and computational weight of self-hosted acoustic models, modern open-weight architectures offer distinct trade-offs across latency, zero-shot cloning fidelity, and inference cost. Selecting a self-hosted TTS engine requires navigating four fundamentally different architectural paradigms: ligh
