Kokoro
hexgradAn 82-million-parameter open-weight text-to-speech model with dozens of preset voices across English, Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Mandarin. Small enough to run on a CPU, it is widely deployed in local apps and commercial APIs.
Maintained by the individual developer hexgrad; the kokoro Python package is the inference library.
Openness
3 high confidence- weights
- open(.pth checkpoint and voice packs, ungated)
- data
- described(a few hundred hours of permissively licensed audio, listed in part)
- code
- partial(inference library only)
- license
- Apache-2.0(OSI)
Kokoro's weights and inference library are Apache-2.0, an OSI-approved license. The card lists some of the openly licensed audio it trained on and sizes the rest at a few hundred hours, but the training set and training code are not published.
- https://huggingface.co/api/models/hexgrad/Kokoro-82M recorded 2026-09-27
"license:apache-2.0" tag, "gated":false, with kokoro-v1_0.pth in the file list.
- https://huggingface.co/hexgrad/Kokoro-82M/raw/main/README.md recorded 2026-09-27
"Audio licensed under Apache, MIT, etc"; "**Total Dataset Size:** A few hundred hours of audio".
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hexgrad/kokoro/HEAD/LICENSE recorded 2026-09-27
LICENSE body is the Apache License, Version 2.0 text: "Apache License".
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hexgrad/kokoro/HEAD/README.md recorded 2026-09-27
"An inference library for [Kokoro-82M](https://huggingface.co/hexgrad/Kokoro-82M)."
Adoption
5 high confidenceHugging Face downloads of the single weights repository. The kokoro package is marked as not a separate channel because it loads this repository.
- https://huggingface.co/api/models/hexgrad/Kokoro-82M recorded 2026-09-27
"downloads":11674701 for hexgrad/Kokoro-82M.
Capability
3 medium confidenceKokoro is mid-table in blind listening tests, well behind the commercial leaders, but it is by far the smallest model near that position.
- https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-speech/leaderboard recorded 2026-09-27
Leaderboard entry "name":"Kokoro 82M v1.0" with "elo":1065.14 and "openWeights":true; 91 models are ranked.
Verified 2026-09-27