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How to change the Piper voice

Download a new voice

Browse available voices at rhasspy/piper-voices on Hugging Face.

Download the .onnx and .onnx.json files to ~/mirach/voices/:

cd ~/mirach/voices
curl -L -o en_US-lessac-medium.onnx \
  https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/main/en/en_US/lessac/medium/en_US-lessac-medium.onnx
curl -L -o en_US-lessac-medium.onnx.json \
  https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/main/en/en_US/lessac/medium/en_US-lessac-medium.onnx.json

Configure the voice

Set the MIRACH_VOICE environment variable in your systemd service:

systemctl --user edit mirach

Add:

[Service]
Environment=MIRACH_VOICE=en_US-lessac-medium.onnx

Then restart:

systemctl --user restart mirach

Adjust voice speed

The MIRACH_VOICE_SPEED variable controls the length_scale parameter:

  • >1 = slower speech
  • <1 = faster speech
  • Default is 1.2
[Service]
Environment=MIRACH_VOICE_SPEED=1.0