piper issue

[ManuInNZ]

As a fresh install (Mac M2 silicon using the curl install), When trying to vox setup and testing piper backend.
I get a No such file error when trying either english or french.

[ManuInNZ]

Same kind of issue with qwen , qwen-native is working

┌ Status ───┐
│Error: mlx_audio generation failed with status exit status: 1

[pszymkowiak]

Hi @ManuInNZ — v0.14.0 is out with fixes for both things you hit:

• fix: bundle espeak-ng-data inside binary (fixes #59) #60 — piper was failing with No such file because espeak-ng-data (~15 MB of phoneme dictionaries) wasn't shipped in the release tarball. The binary now embeds it and extracts to ~/.config/vox/piper/espeak-ng-data/ on first use.
• fix: align backend preference validation with runtime registry #61 — vox bench couldn't save its top pick because the preference validator's allow-list was out of sync with the runtime backend registry (it rejected piper/voxtream and accepted kokoro even when not compiled in). The validator now derives the list from the registry directly.

Validated end-to-end on Linux x86_64 (extracts data, calls piper, audio plays). Could you re-install and confirm on your M2?

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rtk-ai/vox/main/install.sh | sh
vox setup    # test piper en + fr
vox bench    # should now save piper as default

The mlx_audio error on qwen is a separate issue — that backend shells out to a Python tool. qwen-native is the pure-Rust replacement and is what bench auto-picked for you. If you want better UX there (e.g. hide qwen from defaults when Python isn't present), happy to open a follow-up — just say the word.

[ManuInNZ]

Install worked fine and so did bench after (brew reinstall).
I was able to save piper as default backend.

first bench run piper is slower than say but not on second run.

same for some other commands which all worked:

❯ vox -b piper "Fast TTS."
❯ vox config set backend piper
backend = piper