I Built a 1.6M-Parameter Offline Text-to-Speech Engine for Node.js — Here's How

Hi everyone! I'm a developer passionate about making AI accessible on low-resource devices. I've been working on speech synthesis for a while, and I wanted to share a project I've been building: TinyTTS . The idea started from a simple frustration — I needed text-to-speech in a Node.js app, but every option either required Python, called a cloud API, or shipped a massive model. I thought: what if TTS could be as easy as npm install and just work offline? So I built one from scratch. TL;DR 1.6M parameters — smallest TTS model I know of that still sounds natural ~3.4 MB ONNX model (auto-downloaded on first use) 44.1 kHz output, ~53x real-time on a laptop CPU Zero Python dependency — pure Node.js + ONNX Runtime 100% G2P match with the Python version npm install tiny-tts const TinyTTS = require ( ' tiny-tts ' ); const tts = new TinyTTS (); await tts . speak ( ' Hello world! ' , { output : ' hello.wav ' }); The Problem Most TTS solutions for Node.js fall into one of these categories: Approa