Kokoro vs. Piper

Kokoro

Kokoro is trained using long-form texts and chapters.

This is , as opposed to isolated phrases or short sentences.

Therefore, the AI can learns how words, sentences, and punctuation interact across long passages, leading to natural-sounding pauses, emphasis, and intonation. This can be heard when reading text like stories or articles. Since training includes the context of entire sentences, Kokoro can produce prosody (rhythm, stress, and intonation) to match sentences and not just phrases.

Piper

Smaller text-to-speech systems like Piper are trained on phrases or short sentences in isolation. While Piper has a high degree of naturalness for the acoustics of voices and for the prosody of phrases, Piper uses similar prosody across all phrases. In contrast, Kokoro is able to read different sentences differently depending on context.