ElevenLabs

Build me a personal text-to-speech workbench, the DIY slice of ElevenLabs. Requirements: - A Node CLI plus a small local web page (Express, localhost only): paste text, pick a voice preset, get an mp3. - Engine 1: Piper or Kokoro running locally on CPU, free and private. Engine 2: optional OpenAI TTS fallback, key in .env, for when quality beats privacy. - Save every generation to ~/TTS/YYYY-MM-DD/<slug>.mp3 with a sidecar .txt holding the input text plus the engine and voice used. - Voice presets in voices.json: name, engine, voice id, speed. - Batch mode: point it at a folder of .txt files, get a folder of mp3s, for narrating notes or articles. - No accounts, no telemetry, local-first; the only network calls are the optional hosted API. - Out of scope: voice cloning, dubbing, and emotional voice direction. Never clone a real person's voice; that is exactly the part that should not be DIY. - README: model download steps, and state honestly that the voice quality gap versus ElevenLabs is real; frontier voice models plus licensing are the product and cannot be rebuilt solo.