🍊 marmalade-tts — the Linux CLI this grew from
Fast, natural, private text-to-speech for your whole phone. Works offline.
Marmalade TTS gives your phone a voice worth listening to. Set it as your system text-to-speech engine and every app that reads aloud, from screen readers to e-readers to chat apps, speaks through Marmalade. Android TTS is usually a choice between Google's data-hungry default and robotic FOSS engines; Marmalade is the missing middle: neural voices that actually sound human, private by default.
- Natural neural voices. Ready to speak the moment you install
- Fast. Speech responds quickly even on modest phones
- Private by default. Everything runs on your device
- Optional cloud voices. From private third parties with your own API key (Venice.ai)
- Per app voices. Route each app to its own voice
- Speaks 8 languages. Auto detects what language is being read on the Kokoro TTS engine
- Accessible. TalkBack supported and designed to meet WCAG 2.1 AA
- Voice effects. 22 voice effect presets plus an editor to make your own
- Free, open source, no ads, no accounts
Marmalade implements Android's standard text-to-speech interface, so it is a drop-in replacement for Google or Samsung TTS. Aliases tie a voice to speed and effect settings; route apps to aliases and your e-reader can speak in one voice while your chat app uses another. A foreground playback service reads long text reliably with the screen off, with lock-screen and Bluetooth controls, and you can share text from any app or use the system "read selection" action.
- F-Droid — the recommended way to install: reproducible builds and automatic updates.
- GitHub Releases —
grab the latest
fdroid-flavor APK and install it. - Obtainium — add
https://github.com/maxwhipw/marmalade-tts-androidas an app source and you'll get updates automatically as new versions are tagged.
After installing, enable it as the system voice under Android Settings → Accessibility → Text-to-speech output → Preferred engine (path varies slightly by device).
A fast English voice (Kitten Nano) is built into the APK, so Marmalade speaks offline from the first launch. Bigger and better engines download on demand from hostnames pinned in the catalog into app-private storage; add or remove them anytime from the Engines tab. Cloud voices are strictly opt-in: add your own API key for a provider (Venice.ai and OpenAI ship in the list) and mind that only the provider you configure ever sees your text. Details in PRIVACY.md.
Source files are MIT; the repository contains no GPL code. The
released APK compiles in espeak-ng (GPL-3.0-or-later, built from
source out of the pinned third_party/espeak-ng submodule), so the
distributed APK is a GPL-3.0-or-later combined work — required by
Google Play, which forbids downloading executable code at runtime.
Engine downloads carry models and phonemizer data only. Every
third-party license is browsable inside the app at Settings → About →
Open-source licenses, and in NOTICE.md /
LICENSES/.
- marmalade-tts — the Linux CLI ancestor: daemon mode, scripting-first, multi-engine.
- marmalade-android — the OpenClaw AI assistant client it shares its mascot and visual language with.