Read text aloud

Use aria say to play text through your configured voice. Complete setup first. On Linux, keep the registered background service running.

Try it

aria say "Hello from Aria."

You should hear the sentence from your speakers. The command finishes when playback ends. A new utterance replaces the one playing.

To stop speech, run this in another terminal:

aria say \
  --stop

Speed and voice

For a faster voice on one request:

aria say \
  --rate 1.2 \
  "A little faster."

The rate is a multiplier between 0.25 and 4. Use --voice for a voice supported by the selected engine. To list installed system voices on macOS:

say \
  -v '?'

Use a name from that list. For example, if Samantha is available:

aria say \
  --voice Samantha \
  "Hello."

These options affect one utterance. To change the default rate, use Settings.

System voice

The system engine uses macOS’s installed voices, or /usr/bin/espeak-ng or /usr/bin/espeak on Linux. It needs no downloaded model. If a Linux system voice is unavailable, setup can offer Kokoro instead.

Kokoro

Kokoro generates speech locally from a model and voices file. Run aria setup and select Kokoro to download both. It uses English text processing.

If you already have the model and voices file, edit the existing tts section in ~/.aria/config.yaml, using their actual paths. Setup’s default paths are:

tts:
  backend: kokoro
  model: ~/models/kokoro/kokoro.onnx
  voices: ~/models/kokoro/voices.bin
  voice: af_heart
  rate: 1.0

Restart the service, then try the first sentence again. Voice names must exist in the downloaded voices file.

If you want the system voice when Kokoro cannot initialize, add fallback: system to that tts section. Fallback is off by default and applies when the engine or output cannot start.

If nothing plays, follow speech troubleshooting.