speakturbo - Talk to your Claude!

Give your agent the ability to speak to you real-time. Ultra-fast text-to-speech with ~90ms latency and 8 built-in voices.

Quick Start

# Play immediately - you should hear "Hello world" through your speakers
speakturbo "Hello world"
# Output: ⚡ 92ms → ▶ 93ms → ✓ 1245ms

# Verify it's working by saving to file
speakturbo "Hello world" -o test.wav
ls -lh test.wav  # Should show ~50-100KB file

Output explained: ⚡ = first audio received, ▶ = playback started, ✓ = done

First Run

The first execution takes 2-5 seconds while the daemon starts and loads the model into memory. Subsequent calls are ~90ms to first sound.

# First run (slow - daemon starting)
speakturbo "Starting up"  # ~2-5 seconds

# Second run (fast - daemon already running)
speakturbo "Now I'm fast"  # ~90ms

Usage

# Basic - plays immediately (default voice: alba)
speakturbo "Hello world"

# Save to file (no audio playback)
speakturbo "Hello" -o output.wav

# Save to specific file
speakturbo "Goodbye" -o goodbye.wav

# Quiet mode (suppress status messages, still plays audio)
speakturbo "Hello" -q

# List available voices
speakturbo --list-voices

Available Voices

Voice	Type
alba	Female (default)
marius	Male
javert	Male
jean	Male
fantine	Female
cosette	Female
eponine	Female
azelma	Female

Performance

Metric	Value
Time to first sound	~90ms (daemon warm)
First run	2-5s (daemon startup)
Real-time factor	~4x faster
Sample rate	24kHz mono

Architecture

speakturbo (Rust CLI, 2.2MB)
    │
    │ HTTP streaming (port 7125)
    ▼
speakturbo-daemon (Python + pocket-tts)
    │
    │ Model in memory, auto-shutdown after 1hr idle
    ▼
Audio playback (rodio)

Text Input

• Encoding: UTF-8
• Quotes in text: Use escaping: speakturbo "She said \"hello\""
• Long text: Supported, streams as it generates

Output Path Security

The -o flag only writes to directories that are on the allowlist. By default, these are:

• /tmp and system temp directories
• Your current working directory
• ~/.speakturbo/

If you need to write elsewhere, use --allow-dir:

speakturbo "Hello" -o /custom/path/audio.wav --allow-dir /custom/path

To permanently allow a directory, add it to ~/.speakturbo/config:

mkdir -p ~/.speakturbo && echo "/custom/path" >> ~/.speakturbo/config

The config file is one directory per line. Lines starting with # are comments.

Exit Codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success (audio played/saved)
1	Error (daemon connection failed, invalid args)

When to Use

Use speakturbo when:

• You need instant audio feedback (~90ms)
• Speed matters more than voice variety
• Built-in voices are sufficient

Use speak instead when:

• You need custom voice cloning (Morgan Freeman, etc.) → speak "text" --voice ~/.chatter/voices/morgan_freeman.wav
• You need emotion tags like [laugh], [sigh]
• Quality/variety matters more than speed

See the speak skill documentation for full usage.

Troubleshooting

No audio plays:

# Check daemon is running
curl http://127.0.0.1:7125/health
# Expected: {"status":"ready","voices":["alba","marius",...]}

# Verify by saving to file and playing manually
speakturbo "test" -o /tmp/test.wav
afplay /tmp/test.wav  # macOS
aplay /tmp/test.wav   # Linux

Daemon won't start:

# Check port availability
lsof -i :7125

# Manually kill and restart
pkill -f "daemon_streaming"
speakturbo "test"  # Auto-restarts daemon

First run is slow: This is expected. The daemon needs to load the ~100MB model into memory. Subsequent calls will be fast (~90ms).

Daemon Management

The daemon auto-starts on first use and auto-shuts down after 1 hour idle.

# Check status
curl http://127.0.0.1:7125/health

# Manual stop
pkill -f "daemon_streaming"

# View logs
cat /tmp/speakturbo.log

Comparison with speak

Feature	speakturbo	speak
Time to first sound	~90ms	~4-8s
Voice cloning	❌	✅
Emotion tags	❌	✅
Voices	8 built-in	Custom wav files
Engine	pocket-tts	Chatterbox