LMOS VOID Beta 0.43.0: Local Voice Engine Architecture and License-Safe TTS
LMOS adds one governed local text-to-speech layer for device voices and future native Kokoro, Chatterbox, Qwen3-TTS and Parler engines, while keeping Piper behind an explicit GPL review boundary.
What changed
Added a shared LM Voice provider registry for device speech, Kokoro-82M, Chatterbox, Qwen3-TTS, Parler-TTS and Piper.
Added a local TTS capability to the BrowserProvider/NativeProvider runtime contract.
Kept browser/OS speech as the immediate zero-install fallback.
Marked Kokoro-82M as the preferred first permissive local-engine candidate.
Separated engine-code licensing from voice/model-pack licensing.
Added explicit speaker-authorization governance for voice cloning.
Marked the current OHF Piper engine GPL-3.0-or-later and blocked default bundling into proprietary LMOS core pending legal/distribution review.
Added Local Voice status to the simple Local Runtime experience.
Added a Pro Local Voice panel showing engine licenses, strengths, compute posture and gating.
Removed the stale hard-coded Local Runtime update number and tied that screen to the shared LMOS release version.
Why this matters
Read-aloud should be a platform capability, not five different implementations hidden inside Bible, Books, Mediator, Assistant and accessibility features. One voice layer lets LMOS improve quality once while preserving offline-first behavior, provider choice, consent and licensing boundaries.
Next implementation gate
The next native-host wave is model installation and execution: package one permissive engine behind the tts-local NativeProvider adapter, benchmark startup time, memory and real-time factor per device class, then let apps request speech through the shared runtime instead of knowing which model is underneath.
Use the beta on real work.
The most useful feedback is not “I like it.” Tell us where you hesitated, what took too many clicks, what did not save the way you expected, and what would make this useful enough to return to next week.