Hexgrad (Kokoro) AI Releases: Kokoro TTS

ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered one Hexgrad (Kokoro) release so far: Kokoro TTS on Dec 25, 2025. Kokoro TTS: 82M-param Apache 2 model hits #1 on TTS Arena. The entry below has primary-source links and the episode where we covered it live.

1 release1 open weight1 episodecovered Dec 25, 2025

December 2025 1

Hexgrad (Kokoro)
New ModelsOpen weights

Kokoro TTS

Kokoro TTS: 82M-param Apache 2 model hits #1 on TTS Arena

Kokoro, a tiny 82M parameter text-to-speech model, went viral in January after hitting #1 on TTS Arena. Released under Apache 2.0 and small enough to run in the browser, it showed that high-quality speech synthesis no longer required huge models.