Ptah — Native Pt-BR Text-to-Speech CLI for macOS

Offline Brazilian-Portuguese TTS in your terminal. Kokoro neural engine, zero cloud — a fast, native drop-in replacement for macOS say. Single Zig binary, persistent daemon, SQLite-backed queue, and a bundled MCP server so AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor) can speak.

ptah "Olá, eu sou o Ptah."

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What is Ptah?

Ptah speaks Brazilian Portuguese text aloud on macOS, locally and offline, using the Kokoro 82M ONNX model (the pf_dora voice). Named after the Egyptian creator-god who speaks the world into being, Ptah is built for two callers: you at the terminal, and the AI agents that shell out.

• Native, no Python — the engine runs ONNX Runtime + espeak-ng straight from Zig. No sidecar, no venv.
• Single engine, one great voice — Kokoro's pf_dora, the only native-quality female Pt-BR voice. No fallbacks to maintain.
• Daemon + queue — a persistent daemon (launchd) drains a crash-safe SQLite WAL queue; ptah "…" returns in ~1 ms.
• Agent-ready — a bundled stdio MCP server (mcp__ptah__say) lets Claude Code / Cursor speak.
• macOS-only by design — Apple Silicon, afplay playback, zero vendored audio library.

KPI: time-to-first-audio (TTFA). Every choice is justified against it.

Install

brew tap biliboss/tap
brew install biliboss/tap/ptah
ptah daemon install     # start the daemon at login

Or build from source (macOS arm64, Zig 0.16+):

git clone https://github.com/biliboss/ptah && cd ptah
bash vendor/README.md   # see: fetch onnxruntime + brew install espeak-ng
bash scripts/fetch-kokoro.sh
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast

Usage

ptah "Olá, tudo bem?"            # speak (Kokoro pf_dora)
ptah --speed 1.1 "mais rápido"   # adjust pace
ptah queue                       # list pending + playing
ptah skip | pause | resume       # control playback
ptah history --limit 10          # recent items
ptah daemon                      # run the daemon (foreground)
ptah mcp                         # stdio MCP server for agents

Voice

Ptah ships one voice — Kokoro's pf_dora, its Brazilian-Portuguese female voice. Tune it with:

• --speed <0.7..1.5> — speaking pace.
• --voice <name> — Kokoro voice pack (default pf_dora).

MCP — let agents speak

ptah mcp exposes a say tool over stdio JSON-RPC. Register it once:

claude mcp add --transport stdio ptah -- $(which ptah) mcp

Then your agent can call mcp__ptah__say to voice a summary at the right moment.

Why Ptah

	Ptah	macOS say	Piper (Python)	ElevenLabs
Native Pt-BR neural voice	✅ Kokoro pf_dora	⚠️ system voice	✅ (sidecar)	✅
Offline	✅	✅	✅	❌
No Python / no cloud	✅	✅	❌	❌
Persistent crash-safe queue	✅ SQLite WAL	❌	❌	❌
Round-trip ACK (warm)	~1 ms	n/a	n/a	200–800 ms
Bundled MCP server for agents	✅	❌	❌	❌
Single binary	✅	n/a	❌ venv	❌

Docs

Full documentation: biliboss.github.io/ptah — architecture, the engine, roadmap.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Trunk-only on main; tiered local CI via git hooks (bash scripts/install-hooks.sh).

License

Ptah's source is MIT OR Apache-2.0. The shipped binary links espeak-ng (GPL-3.0-or-later), so a distributed build inherits GPL-3.0-or-later. ONNX Runtime is MIT; Kokoro model + voices are Apache-2.0.