# Clone a Voice Locally with Chatterbox TTS

> Use ResembleAI Chatterbox (MIT) to clone a voice from a short reference clip in a few lines of Python, with the consent caveat up front.

- Canonical: https://guides-ai.com/guides/clone-a-voice-locally/
- Plate 12.11 · Topic: AI media (https://guides-ai.com/topics/media/)
- Published: 19 Oct 2026 · 3 min read
- Source site: guides-ai — https://guides-ai.com/

Chatterbox is Resemble AI's open text-to-speech model, released under MIT. It does **zero-shot voice cloning**: give it a few seconds of reference audio and it speaks new text in that voice, with no training step. That is a step beyond the fixed voices in [basic text-to-speech](/guides/text-to-speech-locally/). The one rule that comes first: only clone voices you have permission to use. The full usage is on the [Chatterbox model card](https://huggingface.co/ResembleAI/chatterbox).

## 1. How zero-shot voice cloning works

A zero-shot model conditions on a short reference clip at generation time instead of being fine-tuned per speaker. You hand it the clip as `audio_prompt_path`, and it copies that voice's timbre and delivery onto whatever text you pass. Quality tracks the reference: clean, dry mono audio beats a noisy phone recording. To go the other direction and turn recordings into text, see [transcribe audio with Whisper](/guides/whisper-transcribe-audio-locally/).

## 2. Install Chatterbox

```bash
pip install chatterbox-tts
```

Pulls in the model code plus torch and torchaudio; a CUDA GPU makes generation far faster than CPU.

## 3. Prepare a reference clip

Record or trim a short clip of the target voice speaking clearly, saved as a WAV (the official examples use a roughly ten-second file). Keep it mono and free of music or background noise, because the model imitates whatever it hears, artefacts included.

## 4. Generate speech in that voice

```python
import torchaudio as ta
from chatterbox.tts import ChatterboxTTS

model = ChatterboxTTS.from_pretrained(device="cuda")

text = "Hello, this sentence is spoken in the cloned voice."
wav = model.generate(text, audio_prompt_path="reference.wav")
ta.save("output.wav", wav, model.sr)
```

Loads the model, conditions on `reference.wav`, and writes `output.wav` at the model's own sample rate, read from `model.sr`.

## 5. Consent, length, and the watermark

Generate a sentence to a few sentences per call; split longer text and concatenate the clips. Every Chatterbox output carries Resemble's built-in Perth (Perceptual Threshold) Watermarker, so synthetic audio stays detectable. The ethics are not optional: clone only your own voice or one you have explicit, documented permission to use, and never impersonate a real person.

## Verify it worked

Play `output.wav`: it should read your text in the reference voice. If it sounds like a generic default voice, the reference clip was not applied.

**If it fails:**

- `ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'chatterbox'` — the package is `chatterbox-tts`; reinstall it under that name.
- `torch.cuda.OutOfMemoryError` or no GPU — pass `device="cpu"` to `from_pretrained` (slower, but it runs).
- Robotic or wrong-sounding voice — use a cleaner, longer mono reference; noise and music degrade the clone.