Kokoro speaking funny

[FallingSnow]

Seems to speak like it's talking in old English. In the example below it just skips the 82 number.

$ crispasr
      --server
      --backend kokoro
      -m /home/ayrton/.cache/crispasr/kokoro-82m-q8_0.gguf
      --voice /home/ayrton/.cache/crispasr/kokoro-voice-af_heart.gguf
      --port 8000
      --device 1
      --auto-download
      -l en

Input: "Hello, this is kokoro. A text to speech model with 82 million parameters."
Ouput: kokoro-sample.wav

$ crispasr --version
=== build info ===
  version       : 0.8.19
  git sha       : be4012a8
  git date      : 2026-07-10T01:18:39+02:00
  git subject   : Update_to_version_0.8.9
  build date    : 2026-07-21T08:13:41Z
  build type    : Release
  compiler      : gcc 16.1.1
  os            : linux
  arch          : x86_64
  ggml backends : cpu,cuda

[FallingSnow]

Tried updating to the newest version, same issue.

$ crispasr --version
=== build info ===
  version       : 0.8.23
  git sha       : be4012a8
  git date      : 2026-07-10T01:18:39+02:00
  git subject   : Update_to_version_0.8.9
  build date    : 2026-07-28T00:52:58Z
  build type    : Release
  compiler      : gcc 16.1.1
  os            : linux
  arch          : x86_64
  ggml backends : cpu,cuda

[FallingSnow]

Setting CRISPASR_KOKORO_G2P=espeak-only did improve things, but they are still off. Notice how she becomes British when she says "parameters". This becomes more apparent in other longer segments.

kokoro-sample-espeak-only.wav

Just to make sure this wasn't a model issue, as I've heard kokoro before and it sounded much better, I tried Kokoro-FastAPI. Here the speech is perfect.

kokoro-fast-api.mp3

[CrispStrobe]

Fixed — thanks for the clear report and the Kokoro-FastAPI comparison, which is what made it diagnosable.

Two separate G2P bugs, both now on main (ships in v0.8.24):

The skipped 82 — digits appear in no pronunciation dictionary and no letter-to-sound rule, so a numeric token phonemized to the empty string and the word silently vanished. Numbers are now spelled out before phonemization, following misaki's own reading (1234 → "twelve thirty four", 1005 → "one thousand five").

The accent — Kokoro is trained on misaki's phoneme alphabet (ʧ, O, no length marks); we were feeding it espeak-style IPA (tʃ, oʊ, ː). Every symbol is in Kokoro's vocabulary, so nothing errored — the model just received tokens it never saw in training. ː is the RP length mark, which is most of "becomes British", and why espeak-only helped without fixing it.

Beyond the alphabet, CrispASR now uses misaki's own lexicon (auto-downloaded from hexgrad's repo, pinned to a commit) plus its morphological, contextual and stress rules. Measured agreement with misaki went 58% → 99.1% on a 400-sentence prose corpus and 99.3% on a held-out 10k-word frequency list.

One more thing your report surfaced: the G2P dictionary auto-download had never worked — it was guarded by a macro that was defined nowhere, so a fresh install with no cached cmudict.dict fell through to crude letter-to-sound rules (rendering "this" as θɪs). Given your --auto-download and fresh cache, that was likely part of what you heard too.

Also added --tts-phonemes (kokoro/piper, plus every binding and the HTTP server) to synthesize a phoneme string verbatim — useful for A/B-ing pronunciation against another implementation.

[FallingSnow]

Not a cpp developer but I've tried clearing my ccache. Keep running into this build error.

$ cmake -B build -S "CrispASR-0.8.24" \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_LIBDIR=lib \
    -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF \
    -DGGML_NATIVE=ON \
    -DGGML_CCACHE=ON \
    -DGGML_CUDA=ON \
    -DGGML_VULKAN=OFF \
    -DCRISPASR_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
    -DCRISPASR_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON \
    -DCRISPASR_BUILD_SERVER=ON \
    -Wno-dev
$ cmake --build build
...
[ 99%] Linking CXX executable ../../bin/crispasr-server
[ 99%] Built target crispasr-server
[ 99%] Linking CXX executable ../../bin/crispasr-diff
/usr/bin/ld: ../../src/libkokoro.a(phonemizer.cpp.o): in function `int try_load_dict<g2p_de::dictionary>(g2p_de::dictionary&, char const*, g2p_dict_urls const&, int (*)(g2p_de::dictionary&, std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&))':
/usr/src/debug/crispasr/CrispASR-0.8.24/src/phonemizer.cpp:135:(.text+0x1886): undefined reference to `crispasr_cache::ensure_cached_file(std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&, std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&, bool, char const*, std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&)'
/usr/bin/ld: ../../src/libkokoro.a(phonemizer.cpp.o): in function `crispasr::ensure_misaki_lexicon_loaded()':
/usr/src/debug/crispasr/CrispASR-0.8.24/src/phonemizer.cpp:276:(.text+0x850b): undefined reference to `crispasr_cache::ensure_cached_file(std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&, std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&, bool, char const*, std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&)'
/usr/bin/ld: ../../src/libkokoro.a(phonemizer.cpp.o): in function `crispasr::phonemize_builtin_en(std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&, std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&, std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >&)':
/usr/src/debug/crispasr/CrispASR-0.8.24/src/phonemizer.cpp:203:(.text+0x91de): undefined reference to `crispasr_cache::ensure_cached_file(std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&, std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&, bool, char const*, std::__cxx11::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&)'
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
make[2]: *** [examples/cli/CMakeFiles/crispasr-diff.dir/build.make:221: bin/crispasr-diff] Error 1
make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/Makefile2:5281: examples/cli/CMakeFiles/crispasr-diff.dir/all] Error 2
make[1]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....
[100%] Linking CXX executable ../../bin/crispasr
[100%] Built target crispasr-cli
make: *** [Makefile:136: all] Error 2

Full PKGBUILD:

_ggml_commit=bfe8ea228d8134d03641c9fcf233a9931f3730de
pkgname=crispasr
pkgver=0.8.24
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="Text-to-speech engine with a bundled ggml backend that has many ASR and TTS backends"
arch=('x86_64')
url="https://github.com/CrispStrobe/CrispASR"
license=('MIT')
depends=('glibc' 'gcc-libs' 'cblas' 'blas' 'opus' 'opusfile' 'opencore-amr'
         'libfdk-aac' 'lame' 'sentencepiece' 'vulkan-icd-loader')
makedepends=('cmake' 'shaderc' 'glslang' 'vulkan-headers')
optdepends=('espeak-ng: phonemizer for the kokoro/piper TTS backends (loaded via dlopen)')
options=('!lto')
source=("$pkgname-$pkgver.tar.gz::$url/archive/refs/tags/v$pkgver.tar.gz"
        "ggml-$_ggml_commit.tar.gz::https://github.com/CrispStrobe/ggml/archive/$_ggml_commit.tar.gz"
        "c2pa-audio.tar.gz::https://github.com/CrispStrobe/c2pa-audio/archive/e40329b83f16f67bb5ddc7bb13ae18de0a9376fc.tar.gz")
sha256sums=('SKIP'
            'SKIP'
            'SKIP')

prepare() {
  # ggml is a git submodule and ships empty in the release tarball.
  rmdir "CrispASR-$pkgver/ggml"
  mv "ggml-$_ggml_commit" "CrispASR-$pkgver/ggml"

  rmdir "CrispASR-$pkgver/third_party/c2pa-audio"
  mv "c2pa-audio-e40329b83f16f67bb5ddc7bb13ae18de0a9376fc" "CrispASR-$pkgver/third_party/c2pa-audio"
}

build() {
  cmake -B build -S "CrispASR-$pkgver" \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_LIBDIR=lib \
    -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF \
    -DGGML_NATIVE=ON \
    -DGGML_CCACHE=ON \
    -DGGML_CUDA=ON \
    -DGGML_VULKAN=OFF \
    -DCRISPASR_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
    -DCRISPASR_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON \
    -DCRISPASR_BUILD_SERVER=ON \
    -Wno-dev
  cmake --build build
}

check() {
  ./build/bin/crispasr --help >/dev/null
  ./build/bin/crispasr-server --help >/dev/null
}

package() {
    install -dm755 "$pkgdir/usr/bin"
    install -Dm755 build/bin/* "$pkgdir/usr/bin/"
    install -Dm644 "CrispASR-$pkgver"/LICENSE "$pkgdir/usr/share/licenses/$pkgname/LICENSE"
}

[CrispStrobe]

Thanks for the report and the full PKGBUILD — reproduced and fixed on main (0dfd1673). It's a static-build (BUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF) link-order bug: the #316 CMUdict-download fix enabled phonemizer.cpp's call to crispasr_cache::ensure_cached_file, but phonemizer.cpp is in the kokoro static lib (which links crispasr-core) while crispasr_cache.cpp lived in the higher crispasr-lib — so the linker discarded crispasr_cache.o before phonemizer.o referenced it and crispasr-diff failed. (The shared build and crispasr-cli's link order hid it.) The fix moves crispasr_cache.{h,cpp} down to crispasr-core — the leaf lib every backend already links — exactly like crispasr_imatrix; no cycle, resolves in every link config. I validated it by building crispasr-diff with your exact -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF -DCRISPASR_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON config: links clean, binary present, no undefined reference. It'll be in the next release (0.8.25); if you want to unblock 0.8.24 now you can cherry-pick that one commit into the PKGBUILD as a prepare() patch.

[FallingSnow]

Will test next release. Will leave open until then.