Kokoro-82M for mlx-serve

Kokoro-82M repacked for mlx-serve's native Zig + MLX engine.

Same weights, same precision — f32, not quantized. The repack folds weight-norm into .weight (so the engine has no weight_g/weight_v to resolve), drops the unused pooler tensors, converts .pth to safetensors, and bundles the 54 voice packs plus the English pronunciation dictionaries the phonemizer needs.

Verified against the torch reference: per-phoneme durations match exactly, F0 / noise / text-encoder outputs at cosine 1.000000, and the waveform at 0.9968 — which is inside the reference's own seed-to-seed spread (0.9941–0.9960), since its vocoder is stochastic.

About 17x realtime on an M-series Mac, ~350 MB resident.

Run it

Download MLX Core.app, open Settings ▸ Voice, and pick Kokoro as the voice engine. 54 voices, and naming several separated by commas blends them into a new one.

Over HTTP:

curl -X POST http://localhost:11234/v1/audio/speech \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"model":"kokoro","input":"Hello there.","voice":"af_bella,af_sky"}' \
  --output out.wav

Credit

Kokoro-82M and the misaki G2P dictionaries are both by hexgrad, Apache-2.0. This repo only changes the packaging. No espeak-ng anywhere in the pipeline — the dictionaries make it unnecessary, which keeps the whole path Apache-2.0.