Question 1

What audio format does the chute return?

Accepted Answer

Raw audio/wav bytes at 24 kHz, returned directly as the response body. There is no JSON envelope and no base64 encoding; save the body to a .wav file or pipe it into playback.

Question 2

Which voices are available and how do I pick one?

Accepted Answer

54 preset voices, enumerated in the chute's llms.txt. IDs encode language and gender: af_/am_ American English female/male, bf_/bm_ British English, ef_/em_ Spanish, ff_ French, hf_/hm_ Hindi, if_/im_ Italian, jf_/jm_ Japanese, pf_/pm_ Portuguese, zf_/zm_ Chinese. The default is af_heart.

Question 3

Can Kokoro clone my voice or follow style instructions?

Accepted Answer

No. Kokoro only offers fixed preset voices with a speed control. For zero-shot voice cloning, preset speakers with emotion instructions, or voice design from a text description on Chutes, use the AudioDojo chute's Qwen3-TTS endpoints; its /speak endpoint is also a drop-in replacement for this chute.

Question 4

What does the speed parameter do?

Accepted Answer

It is a playback speed multiplier with a default of 1. Values below 1 slow the voice down, values above 1 speed it up. It is the only synthesis control besides voice selection.

Question 5

What license is Kokoro under? Can I use the audio commercially?

Accepted Answer

The weights are Apache-2.0, per the hexgrad/Kokoro-82M Hugging Face repo. The model card explicitly welcomes deployment in commercial APIs and real use cases. Apache-2.0 permits commercial use with attribution and license notice.

Question 6

How large is the model and why does that matter?

Accepted Answer

82 million parameters, tiny by TTS standards. That footprint is what makes it fast and cheap to serve; the model card cites market pricing under $1 per million characters of input, roughly $0.06 per hour of generated audio.

Question 7

How do I call it from code?

Accepted Answer

POST flat JSON to https://chutes-kokoro.chutes.ai/speak with an Authorization: Bearer header carrying your Chutes API key, e.g. {"text": "Hello", "voice": "af_heart", "speed": 1}. Write the binary response body to a .wav file.

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