Install Piper TTS on Debian (Offline Neural Text-to-Speech)

Piper is an open-source, offline neural text-to-speech (TTS) engine developed by Rhasspy. It allows you to generate speech locally without relying on cloud services, making it perfect for privacy-conscious applications or offline systems.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to install Piper on Debian Linux, download an English voice model, and generate a test speech audio.

Step 1: Install dependencies

Before installing Piper, make sure your system has the required packages:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y wget tar curl python3 python3-pip ffmpeg

ffmpeg is optional but useful to play or convert generated audio files.

Step 2: Download and install Piper

Download the Piper binary and place it in your system PATH:

cd /opt
sudo wget https://github.com/rhasspy/piper/releases/download/v1.2.0/piper_amd64.tar.gz
sudo tar -xzf piper_amd64.tar.gz

cd piper/
# Move the Piper binary itself to /usr/local/bin
sudo mv piper /usr/local/bin/
# also need to move piper all file on /usr/loca/bin/
mv * /usr/local/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/piper

Test the installation:

piper --version

Expected output:

1.2.0

Step 3: Download a voice model

Create a directory to store Piper voice models:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/piper-voices
cd /opt/piper-voices

Download an English female voice model (Lessac Medium):

sudo wget https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_US/lessac/medium/en_US-lessac-medium.onnx
sudo wget https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_US/lessac/medium/en_US-lessac-medium.onnx.json

Ensure both .onnx and .json files are in the same folder.

Step 4: Generate a test audio

Create a sample speech audio:

echo "Hello, this is a test of Piper TTS on Debian" | \
piper --model /opt/piper-voices/en_US-lessac-medium.onnx --output_file /tmp/test.wav