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Comment by dawdler-purge | Hacker News Reader

I created a CLI wrapper for Kitten TTS: https://github.com/newptcai/purr

BTW, it seems that kitten (the Python package) has the following chain of dependencies: kittentts → misaki[en] → spacy-curated-transformers

So if you install it directly via uv, it will pull torch and NVIDIA CUDA packages (several GB), which are not needed to run kitten.

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Thanks, your install script worked for me.

In case it helps anyone else, the first time I tried to run purr I got "OSError: PortAudio library not found". Installing libportaudio (apt install libportaudio2) got it running.

Also did create a cli. I had to fork the project and removed one unused import which allowed me to remove a lot of unused ml libraries: https://github.com/Mic92/puss-say

Unfortunately upstream never looks at any pull requests.

Thank you so much, that fixes an enormous pain point I was hitting. It's not just the size, that dependency chain was actually breaking on my machine and failing to install. Are we losing something by dropping the extra dependencies?

I don't think so. It is perhaps a bug to have this unnecessary dependency. I expect the author of kitten to fix this soon.

thanks a lot for helping w this. yes i'll fix this asap.

Please let me know when this has been fixed. I will update purr to make the installation steps simpler.

You might also like CopySpeak, a lightweight tool I've recently built for quick AI text-to-speech using the clipboard, featuring Kitten TTS and other engines.

https://github.com/ilyaizen/CopySpeak

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