Edinburgh CSTR
by University of Edinburgh
Centre for Speech Technology Research — VCTK + Merlin TTS + Festival origins.
TL;DR
Centre for Speech Technology Research — VCTK + Merlin TTS + Festival origins.
Best for tTS research; multi-speaker corpora; statistical parametric speech synthesis history. Pricing: free.
Category
Open source
License
—
Stars
—
Last push
—
Pricing
free
Platforms
Web
What it is
Edinburgh CSTR pioneered statistical parametric TTS (HTS, Merlin) and released VCTK, the canonical multi-speaker English corpus. Major academic hub for TTS + voice cloning.
Best for: TTS research; multi-speaker corpora; statistical parametric speech synthesis history.
Watch out for: Academic; tools open-source.
Watch out for: Academic; tools open-source.
Install / use
https://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/
Features
| Speaker diarization | No |
| Word-level timestamps | No |
| Streaming / real-time | No |
| Languages supported | 0 |
| HIPAA eligible | No |
Edinburgh CSTR vs Whipscribe
| Feature | Edinburgh CSTR | Whipscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Open source | Transcription APIs |
| Pricing | free | free beta |
| Speaker diarization | No | Yes |
| Word timestamps | No | Yes |
| Streaming | No | No |
| Languages | 0 | 99 |
| Platforms | Web | Web, API, MCP |
Alternatives to Edinburgh CSTR
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