Audio
16.6. Audio
10 TTS providers, from free to high-end
Hermes supports text-to-speech through 10 providers: Edge TTS (free), ElevenLabs, OpenAI TTS, MiniMax, Mistral Voxtral, Google Gemini, xAI, NeuTTS, KittenTTS, Piper — plus the ability to attach any local CLI TTS via a custom command provider.
Choosing a provider by purpose
| Need | Suggestion |
|---|---|
| Creative content, the most natural voice | ElevenLabs — high quality, supports cloning your own voice |
| Offline, private, no network needed | Piper or KittenTTS — lightweight local engines |
| Already have a Nous Portal subscription | OpenAI TTS via the Tool Gateway — no extra API key needed |
How it works when playing long content
Hermes buffers each complete sentence, strips markdown/emoji/reasoning blocks before feeding them to TTS, then plays sentence by sentence in real time — with providers that support streaming (ElevenLabs, OpenAI), the latency to the first audio is the lowest.
Applications to content production
- Turn a drafted article/newsletter into an audio version to publish as a podcast or voice message.
- For long text that exceeds a provider’s per-request character limit, Hermes automatically splits it into sentence-level chunks and stitches them back together — no truncated content.
Notes
- For public content (podcasts, videos), choose a provider that allows a consistent custom voice ID across generations — avoid the voice changing with every run, which breaks the identity.
- For sensitive internal content that must be turned into audio, prefer a local provider (Piper/KittenTTS) so the data never leaves the machine — the same principle as choosing a read-only user for the database in chapter 11.3: keep the surface that handles sensitive data as narrow as possible.