Skip to content

OpenWhisperer 2.0.0 — it speaks Dutch (and German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian)

Choose a tag to compare

@PerIPan PerIPan released this 30 Jul 22:44
· 25 commits to main since this release

Open Whisperer can now speak languages Kokoro has no voice for. A second TTS engine, Supertonic-3, runs alongside Kokoro and takes the languages it can't.

Your Dutch reply is now actually Dutch

Before this, a Dutch reply was read aloud by an English voice. That's worse than it sounds — it isn't "Dutch with an accent", it's unintelligible. Feeding the synthesized audio to a speech recognizer and asking it to write down what it heard:

what the recognizer heard error rate
Before (English voice) "D test Slagin New Alemolol." ~100%
After (Dutch voice) the sentence, one word off ~4%

The original was "Ik heb de wijzigingen doorgevoerd in het configuratiebestand. De tests slagen nu allemaal…".

What's new

  • Five new languages in Settings → Voice: Dutch, German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian — two voices each. Pick one and replies are spoken in that language.
  • Replies are written in your voice's language. Picking a Dutch voice isn't enough on its own — a Dutch voice reading English text helps nobody. Your agent is now told to write the spoken summary in that language. Your on-screen reply is unaffected.
  • It's fast. The new engine runs on the Neural Engine at ~19× realtime — roughly 10× quicker than the existing English voices, so spoken replies start sooner.
  • Nothing changes if you're on English. The multilingual model (~264 MB) downloads only when you actually select one of these voices. Existing voice settings keep working untouched.

Also in this release

  • Settings window is slightly slimmer.
  • Removed the redundant underline beneath the logo tab.

Notes

  • Requires Apple Silicon, macOS 14+.
  • Mandarin stays on the existing Kokoro voices — the new engine wasn't trained on it.
  • Gatekeeper: as with previous releases, this build isn't notarized. On first launch, right-click the app → Open, then confirm.