What’s the best TTS (text-to-speech) app for Android in 2026?

1

Hello everyone.

Could you please tell me which TTS app is the best for Android?

I’ve tried the most popular ones, but they either don’t work, are 2–3 years old and haven’t been updated, have terrible, poor-quality speech, or have some kind of proprietary anti-feature.

After a clean install of LineageOS, the user doesn’t have TTS, so they need to install it. I’ve tried these ones:

I also had a look at the “awesome” list on GitHub awesome-privacy/ at main · pluja/awesome-privacy · GitHub , but I still couldn’t find anything for Android that worked reliably.

I’d be grateful for your advice.:folded_hands:

2

you should start by saying “which language”, because it takes work and not all are nicely developed

3

Thank you very much for your reply.
Let’s just say it’s a multilingual programme))
This is the bug I encountered today after a clean install.

bug-lineageos

4

Report that issue to Lineage or whatever you are using, it should not crash.

Can you open it from Android Settings - System - Input&language instead?

5

I’ve been messaging Luk (LineageOS) – he’s not very friendly and only replies to users’ messages when he feels like it, or sometimes doesn’t reply at all.

Your forum is brilliant! Because users can help each other (in my personal opinion), and you, as a developer, always reply here – that’s great!

I have a slightly different path (if we’re talking about the same thing). It’s Settings => System => Language & region => Speech => Text-to-speech output. And yes, it does crash or freeze as you mentioned…

6

Easily fixed via ADB – I had the same here on LOS based ROMs. Assuming you use SherpaTTS:

$ adb shell settings get secure tts_default_synth
none
$ adb shell settings put secure "tts_default_synth" org.woheller69.ttsengine
$ adb shell settings get secure tts_default_synth
org.woheller69.ttsengine

Now, SherpaTTS will work. And yes, it’s a known bug in LOS, since around 2024 – somehow, whatever TTS you install, will not be registered properly with the system (which is what this ADB command does).

To your original question: yes, I’d recommend SherpaTTS. Depending what languages you need, RHVoice should also be a good choice. Only when your “language needs” are not covered by either, I’d go with eSpeak – which has good language coverage, but sounds rather robotic in comparison.

1 Like
7

Sherpa is good, recently updated. When I took a look at others, they just rejected me, so I had no reason to go deeper and kept to SherpaTTS. Check other apps of it’s dev, woheller.