I Cloned a Family Voice for My Google Home. Here's the Real Story.

My Google Home speaker used to announce things in a generic Kannada voice from a cloud TTS API. It worked fine. But I wanted something warmer — a voice that sounded like it belonged in the house. Here's how that went. Spoiler: it involved one dead-end on a Raspberry Pi, a new machine, and some surprisingly good results on plain CPU hardware. The Problem with Cloud TTS for Family Announcements I was using Sarvam.AI's Bulbul v3 for Kannada TTS — good quality, but it's a cloud API call every time. For a "wake up, school in 20 minutes" announcement, that's a latency hit plus API dependency. More importantly, the voice sounds like a stranger. I wanted the house to speak with a familiar voice. The obvious candidate was LuxTTS — an open-source voice cloning model that can take a 3-second audio sample and generate speech in that voice. Attempt 1: Raspberry Pi I cloned the LuxTTS repo, set up a venv, and ran through the install. Dependencies pulled fine: PyTorch, LinaCodec, piper_phonemize, the