# Why I Built an Open‑Source ElevenLabs

> VoiceStudio.sh — voice cloning, design, dubbing and dictation as a local desktop app. 600+ languages, self-hosted, yours.

- Author: Palash Debnath (https://palash.dev/)
- Published: 2026-07-08
- Updated: 2026-08-13
- Tags: omnivoice, ai, audio, open-source
- Canonical: https://palash.dev/blog/omnivoice-open-source-elevenlabs/

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Voice AI got good. Then it got rented.

The best cloning and dubbing live behind APIs: your voice goes to someone's cloud, comes back priced per second, under terms that can change any quarter. For a demo, fine. For a studio you depend on — or a voice that happens to be *yours* — no.

So I built VoiceStudio.sh: the open-source ElevenLabs alternative, as a desktop app. Clone, design, create, dub, dictate. Locally.

## What's inside

- **Cloning and voice design** — capture a voice or build one from scratch.
- **Dubbing pipeline** — cinematic, multi-track, end to end.
- **Dictation** — your machine, your microphone, your text.
- **600+ languages.**
- **Swappable engines** — Whisper and friends, on your hardware: MLX on Apple silicon, CUDA on NVIDIA, Docker when you want it on a server.
- **An OpenAPI surface** — the studio doubles as a self-hosted API, so your tools can speak too.

Tauri desktop app around a Python core. Launchpad, studio, library, gallery — it's built to be lived in, not demoed.

## The bet

Voice is identity. It's the most personal biometric you casually give away, and the current market structure is "upload it and subscribe to yourself."

I bet people would rather own the stack. Nearly 10,000 GitHub stars later, I'd say the bet is holding.

Enterprise-grade processing with nothing leaving your machine — that's not a feature tier. That's the point.

## Get it

[github.com/debpalash/VoiceStudio](https://github.com/debpalash/VoiceStudio) — free, open source, self-hosted.

Your voice. Your hardware. Your studio.