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The best free ElevenLabs alternative: Chatterbox (open source)

Chatterbox gives you natural AI voices and voice cloning for free. Try it in a minute in your browser, or run it on your own computer with one command. Here's how, plus what you give up compared with ElevenLabs.

Updated October 20, 2026 · by AGI Point

Chatterbox at a glance

Models	Multilingual V3 (23+ languages, voice cloning), Turbo (fast English with tags like [laugh]), Nano (runs on a normal CPU)
Runs on	The online demo, or your computer
License	MIT, about 27K ★ on GitHub
Costs	$0

Option A. Try it in a minute, online

1. Open the free Chatterbox demo on Hugging Face (huggingface.co/spaces/ResembleAI): the Multilingual demo, or the Turbo demo for English. No account needed.
2. Type a sentence or two. Short sentences sound most natural.
3. Optional: upload about 10 seconds of clean speech to copy that voice's style. Only your own voice, or one you have permission to use.
4. Press Generate, then download the audio.

Option B. Run it on your computer

You need Python 3.11. It runs on NVIDIA graphics cards, Apple Silicon Macs or a plain CPU (slower; Nano is built for CPUs):

pip install chatterbox-tts

Never used Python? Let Claude Code do the setup. In an empty folder, type:

Set up Chatterbox TTS (pip package chatterbox-tts) in a Python 3.11 virtual environment in this folder.
Then make a small script: it reads my text from text.txt, uses my reference clip voice.wav if it exists, and saves the result as output.wav.
Use my Mac's GPU if possible (mps), otherwise the CPU. Test it once and tell me the one command I run each time.

Tips and honest limits

• Write numbers as you'd say them ("twenty twenty-six") and generate long scripts one sentence at a time.
• ElevenLabs has a polished app, a big voice library and studio features; Chatterbox gives you the voices free, but you do the setup.
• Never clone someone's voice without permission, and label AI voices where platforms ask.

Questions