Mimic Classic – lightweight Text to Speech engine

Last Updated on February 11, 2024

Mimic Classic is a fast, lightweight Text to Speech engine developed by Mycroft and VocaliD, built on top of Carnegie Mellon University’s FLITE technology.

Mimic takes in text and reads it out aloud to create a high quality voice. By default mimic will play the text using an audio device. Alternatively it can output the wave file in RIFF format (often called .wav).

It is light enough to run on Raspberry Pi class hardware.

Mycroft is open source. This means that the code used by Mycroft can be inspected, copied, modified, and contributed back to the Mycroft community for everyone to enjoy. Mycroft has intentionally been built in a modular fashion.

Features include:

• Low-latency and has a small resource footprint.
• Range of high quality voices. The more realistic sounding voices are generated on Mycroft servers and require significant hardware to synthesize speech within a reasonable time frame.
• Cross-platform support – runs on Linux, Android, and Windows. Both ARM and Intel architectures are supported.
• Lightweight, and will run on low-powered hardware, such as the Raspberry Pi 3 and Pi 4.

Website: github.com/MycroftAI/mimic1
Support: Documentation
Developer: Mycroft
License: BSD-like licenses

Mimic Classic is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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