# skald — `engine/kokoro` variant

This branch is the **Kokoro-82M TTS backend** variant of
[skald](https://git.sulkta.com/Sulkta-OSS/skald). It carries
engine-specific tuning for Kokoro that doesn't generalise to the
other backends; everything else tracks `main`.

For the full project — the story-writer, the schema, the narration
pipeline — see `main` and the root `README.md`.

## What's different here

Kokoro-82M is the fast, audiobook-quality narrator. At 82M
parameters it's tiny and quick (~50x real-time on a modest GPU) but
has a couple of rough edges this branch works around in
`engines/kokoro/server.py`:

- **Question prosody** — single `?` reads flat, so interrogatives
  get a stronger rising contour applied at synth time.
- **Pacing gaps** — paragraph / scene / breath gap durations tuned
  for long-form prose narration.
- **Pronunciation respellings** — Kokoro's phonemizer treats
  consecutive capitals as initialisms, so proper-noun respellings
  are seeded lowercase-syllabified.

## Usage

The Kokoro sidecar speaks the same `POST /synthesize` + `GET
/healthz` contract as the other engines (see `engines/README.md`).
Point skald's `KOKORO_URL` at it and route `kokoro_*` voices to it.

```bash
docker compose up -d            # skald + postgres
# bring up the Kokoro sidecar from engines/kokoro/
```

## License

AGPL-3.0-or-later — see `LICENSE`.