Your first voice in 60 seconds

This guide takes you from a fresh install to hearing VoxStudio speak.

1. Launch VoxStudio

Open the app. A short Warming up VoxStudio screen appears while the voice engine starts. The ring of bars sweeps while it works, and each step is ticked off as it finishes:

  1. Launching voice engine: VoxStudio starts voxd in the background.
  2. Preparing runtime: on the very first launch, VoxStudio sets up its private Python runtime. This takes a minute or two and happens only once.
  3. Checking voices: voxd looks for the voice engines available on your computer.

When everything is ready, the screen fades away. The sidebar footer shows a green dot and Engine ready.

First launch: pick your voices

The first time, a short welcome sheet appears:

  1. Welcome: what makes VoxStudio different.
  2. Choose your first voices: Kokoro (recommended: 54 natural voices, 354 MB) or just system voices (no download).
  3. Download: watch it progress, or choose Continue in background and keep exploring. When it's done, Start creating switches Home to your new voices.

If it doesn't start: click Show details to see the engine log, then Try again. The most common cause is a missing uv. Install it from https://docs.astral.sh/uv/ and relaunch.

2. Speak

On Home, find the Try a voice card.

  1. Edit the text, or keep the sample sentence.
  2. If Kokoro is installed, choose System or Kokoro in the top-right of the card.
  3. Pick a voice. Voices are grouped by language, with yours first; ♀ and ♂ mark the voice's gender.
  4. Choose a pace: Calm, Natural or Brisk.
  5. Click Speak, or press ⌘↩.

The orb reacts to the audio as it plays.

3. Replay

Every generation is saved as a take. Your latest takes appear under the text box; click ▶ to replay one.

Next steps