Voice Cloning Pipeline

Prerequisites: Python 3.10+; a GPU is helpful but not required; a short (6+ second), clean reference voice recording you have explicit permission to clone.

Targeted versions: coqui-tts (the community-maintained fork of the original Coqui TTS package); XTTS-v2 model weights — verified against the coqui-tts project repository, mid-2026.

⚠ Before you start: only clone voices you have explicit permission to clone. XTTS-v2's weights are licensed under the Coqui Public Model License, which is non-commercial only — for a shippable commercial product, use a permissively-licensed alternative like Chatterbox instead, or a paid API.

Voice cloning here means zero-shot speaker adaptation: instead of training a new model on hours of one person's speech, XTTS-v2 was trained to extract a speaker embedding from a short reference clip and condition its speech generation on that embedding at inference time. That's why it works from just ~6 seconds of audio rather than requiring a dedicated training run.

You'll clone a voice from a short sample, generate new speech in that voice, and try cross-lingual synthesis — cloning a voice from an English sample, then having it speak Spanish. The original Coqui AI company shut down in January 2024, but the model weights remain freely downloadable and a community-maintained fork keeps the package installable on current Python versions.