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We've built our own text-to-speech system with an initial English language model we trained ourselves with fully open source data. It will be added to our App Store soon and then included in GrapheneOS as a default enabled TTS backend once some more improvements are made to it.

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GrapheneOS

We're going to build our own speech-to-text implementation to go along with this too. We're starting with an English model for both but we can add other languages which have high quality training data available. English and Mandarin have by far the most training data available.
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GrapheneOS

Existing implementations of text-to-speech and speech-to-text didn't meet our functionality or usability requirements. We want at least very high quality, low latency and robust implementations of both for English included in the OS. It will help make GrapheneOS more accessible.
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GrapheneOS

Our full time developer working on this already built their own Transcribro app for on-device speech-to-text available in the Accrescent app store. For GrapheneOS itself, we want actual open source implementations of these features rather than OpenAI's phony open source though.
This entry was edited (Thursday, January 29, 2026, 10:12 PM)
in reply to GrapheneOS

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GrapheneOS

Whisper is actually closed source. Open weights is another way of saying permissively licensed closed source. Our implementation of both text-to-speech and speech-to-text will be actual open source which means people can actually fork it and add/change/remove training data, etc.
This entry was edited (Thursday, January 29, 2026, 10:21 PM)
in reply to Tim Chambers

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GrapheneOS

@tchambers It's not really platform specific. It currently runs on the CPU but we plan to add TPU support for Tensor and NPU support for Snapdragon in the future. It's made for GrapheneOS and we're not interested in doing any significant work on use outside of GrapheneOS. It will be possible to install it from our App Store on other Android 16+ operating systems but it's not our focus. We're focused on making GrapheneOS better and haven't gotten much out of making stuff available elsewhere.
@Tim Chambers
in reply to Breizh

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GrapheneOS

@breizh It wasn't quite good enough and has very high latency which makes it unsuitable for use with TalkBack. We're making this because existing options including Sherpa don't meet our requirements. Otherwise, we could have forked those. It made more sense to make our own instead which we'll be able to continue improving long term. It's similar to our network location and geocoding implementations where we want things done a particular way focused on high quality in all areas we care about.
@Breizh
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Peter Vágner

@GrapheneOS I'm interested in having working open-source #TTS for Slovak language in the future. I my-self am not proficient enough to create my own high quality engine but I think I still might be helpfull. During all these years I've been contributing to eSpeak-ng slovak language support and recently with friends @ondrosik and @Zvonimir Stanecic we are contributing to #RHVoice.
Thus I will be watching the development of your TTS engine to find out if it can be trained using a homelab setup and if adding support for the language is something I might be able to help with.
Thank you for this news and all the hard work you've put into it.
#tts #RHVoice @GrapheneOS @ondrosik @Zvonimir Stanecic
in reply to Marcial 🇨🇷🇻🇪

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GrapheneOS

@moshimotsu We have a bunch of donations options including local bank transfers with very low fees via Wise or sending money via Wise itself which has no fee if it's a matching currency. We already have a lot of options and adding more results in higher costs for managing it and handling accounting. We have to spend a huge amount of money on accounting and also auditing. The more complex the finances, the more money we'll need to spend on that. Why not use bank transfers or Wise?
@Marcial 🇨🇷🇻🇪
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GrapheneOS

@moshimotsu GitHub Sponsors provides credit card donations with 0% fees for donations from individuals which isn't something we can get elsewhere. The fees elsewhere are often over 5% when currency conversion is taken into account. We don't want to move more of the donations to high fee platforms. We have PayPal as a donation method but our donate page tries to make sure people understand the high fees and that it's better to donate another way such as GitHub Sponsors, Wise or bank transfers.
@Marcial 🇨🇷🇻🇪
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Marcial 🇨🇷🇻🇪

Truth be told, I’ve never heard of Wise until this very moment, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many others haven’t either. But really the reason I ask is because, for many, these are very recognizable channels through which supporting a project “just makes sense.” When onboarding friction is lower, more people usually donate because they can just use a familiar system. I only asked because I felt having those might lead to more donos, rather than personal need!
in reply to Marcial 🇨🇷🇻🇪

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GrapheneOS

@moshimotsu LiberaPay isn't used much based on en.liberapay.com/explore/recip…. GrapheneOS likely receives more monthly donations than the total amount going through LiberaPay based on past numbers they've given on the total going through it. We were setting up Open Collective at one point prior to having our non-profit but ended up just using our own non-profit instead of needing a fiscal host to handle it. We're on Benevity already because some people can only donate through that but we prefer Wise.

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@Marcial 🇨🇷🇻🇪
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