Calibre can now read ebooks aloud without sounding like a robot

A new update to the Calibre ebook manager is out and it brings more natural sounding text-to-speech (TTS) voices, as well as AVIF image support and better handling of PDFs that put text in columns. Calibre v9.16 adds support for Kokoro, an open-weight TTS model, to its Read Aloud feature (which to state the bleedin’ obvious, will read the content of books to you). The new voices are sound to sound ‘much more natural’, especially in English. Kokoro voices aren’t preinstalled or included in Calibre itself. You choose one via the backend picker in the Read aloud configuration panel and […]
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https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/10/calibre-read-aloud-kokoro-voices