In case it helps anyone else, the first time I tried to run purr I got "OSError: PortAudio library not found". Installing libportaudio (apt install libportaudio2) got it running.
Also did create a cli. I had to fork the project and removed one unused import which allowed me to remove a lot of unused ml libraries: https://github.com/Mic92/puss-say
Thank you so much, that fixes an enormous pain point I was hitting. It's not just the size, that dependency chain was actually breaking on my machine and failing to install. Are we losing something by dropping the extra dependencies?
You might also like CopySpeak, a lightweight tool I've recently built for quick AI text-to-speech using the clipboard, featuring Kitten TTS and other engines.
BTW, it seems that kitten (the Python package) has the following chain of dependencies: kittentts → misaki[en] → spacy-curated-transformers
So if you install it directly via uv, it will pull torch and NVIDIA CUDA packages (several GB), which are not needed to run kitten.