Setup

Start with a small Cargo project: add the dependencies for your task, check that they build, then run an example. You can use the same dependencies in an existing project. No Aria service or configuration file is required.

Build tools

Install stable Rust and Cargo with rustup. These examples target macOS and Linux.

Whisper and Kokoro need a C/C++ compiler, CMake, and Clang/libclang. On macOS, install the Xcode command-line tools.

On Linux, microphone capture and library playback also need ALSA development headers and pkg-config. For the system voice, install espeak-ng or espeak under /usr/bin. macOS provides the system voice through say.

Create a project

cargo new speech-demo
cd speech-demo

Run the remaining commands from speech-demo, unless a page says otherwise. cargo add adds the latest release of each crate to Cargo.toml.

Transcription

cargo add aria-stt --features whisper

aria-stt has no engine enabled by default. The whisper feature selects the native Whisper implementation.

For microphone input, also enable the microphone feature:

cargo add aria-stt --features microphone

Speech output

For the system voice, run:

cargo add aria-tts --features system

For Kokoro audio generation, run this instead:

cargo add aria-tts --features kokoro

If your application uses both Whisper and Kokoro, add both aria-stt and aria-tts. To use both the system voice and Kokoro, run cargo add aria-tts --features system,kokoro.

Check the build

cargo check

The first build downloads the crates. Microphone capture and Kokoro also need ONNX Runtime, which the build downloads and verifies when needed. Download speech models separately, as shown in each example.

If you already have compatible ONNX Runtime libraries, you can select them with ORT_LIB_LOCATION:

ORT_LIB_LOCATION=/opt/onnxruntime/lib \
  cargo check

After the check passes, you’re ready to transcribe a file, record from a microphone, or generate speech.