
Chatterbox
MIT-licensed open TTS family — 23 languages, emotion control, beats ElevenLabs in evals.
About
Chatterbox is Resemble AI's open-source text-to-speech model family, MIT-licensed. The lineup covers three variants: the 500M standard model with classifier-free guidance and exaggeration tuning for creative control, Chatterbox Multilingual (500M, 23 languages), and Chatterbox Turbo (350M, distilled one-step decoder for ultra-low-latency real-time synthesis). It was the first open TTS model with emotion exaggeration control, ships with the PerTh implicit watermarker for responsible deployment, and in Podonos blind evaluations has been preferred over ElevenLabs and Cartesia voices.
The honest picture: as with all open TTS, quality depends on your prompt and reference audio — the headline eval wins are under controlled conditions, not a guarantee on every voice. The Turbo variant trades some expressiveness for speed. And the watermarking, while responsible, means outputs are detectable as synthetic, which matters if you need "clean" audio. Resemble AI also sells a hosted API, so the open models are the community tier of a commercial funnel.
Specs
Context window
Pricing
Free quota
API access
Weights
Released
Benchmarks
Provider-reported unless a source says otherwise. Benchmarks are marketing-adjacent by nature — treat them as directional.
Use cases
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via vendor site/docs/GitHub and reputable coverage, wave 45; Trending score 84/100 from researcher assessment.