Lyre - Text-to-Speech for World of Warcraft

Disclaimer: This addon requires a companion app. It won't work by itself. The companion app is currently in alpha testing an unavailable for downloading at the present time.

Lyre gives every NPC a voice. Quest text, gossip, books, mail, and world dialogue are read aloud with high-quality neural TTS: bringing the world to life for the thousands of quests and NPCs that don't have voice acting.

Lyre automatically detects when Blizzard's own voice acting is playing and stays silent, so you hear professional VO when it exists and TTS everywhere else.

Features

Quest text, gossip, books, and mail: automatically spoken when you open them
NPC world dialogue: captures /say, /yell, and /whisper from NPCs in the world
Smart voiced detection: automatically skips TTS for NPCs with native voice acting using a database of 62,000+ transcribed voice lines across all 11 WoW locales
Per-NPC voice variety: different NPCs get different voices based on gender and creature type
Narrator voice: angle-bracket text like <He nods solemnly.> is spoken in a separate narrator voice
Multiple TTS engines: Edge (default), Kokoro (offline), OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Piper, or System TTS
Now Playing overlay: shows current speaker and text, with queued lines
Dialogue Monitor: review panel to report false positives/negatives and help improve the voiced detection database
Keybinds: speak, stop, and mark lines as voiced from your keyboard
Cross-platform: Windows, Linux (X11 and Wayland), and macOS

How It Works

Lyre has two parts:

The WoW addon (this download): captures quest text and NPC dialogue inside WoW
The companion app (lyre-tts): runs alongside WoW, receives text from the addon, and speaks it using TTS

The addon communicates with the companion through a tiny pixel strip rendered on-screen. No memory reading, no injection: fully compliant with Blizzard's addon policies.

Getting Started

Install this addon
Download and run the lyre-tts companion app (currently in alpha testing and unavailable for general use, please be patient)
Open a quest: you should hear it spoken!

Use /lyre to open settings. Use /lyre test to verify the companion is connected.

Slash Commands

Command	Description
`/lyre`	Open settings
`/lyre test`	Send a test message to the companion
`/lyre voiced`	Mark last NPC line as voiced (stops TTS for that NPC)
`/lyre review`	Open the Dialogue Monitor
`/lyre status`	Show connection and database status
`/lyre stop`	Stop current TTS playback

Voiced Detection

Lyre uses a multi-layered system to avoid talking over Blizzard's voice acting:

Talking Head detection: lines with an active Talking Head popup are always skipped
Cinematic subtitles: skipped automatically
Dialogue database: 62,000+ voice lines transcribed from WoW's audio files using speech recognition, matched with fuzzy text comparison
Creature database: 5,700+ creature IDs known to have voice-over files
Player feedback: use the Dialogue Monitor or /lyre voiced to teach Lyre about lines it gets wrong

If Lyre speaks over a voiced line, use /lyre voiced or the Dialogue Monitor to report it: your feedback helps improve detection for everyone.

Supported Locales

Voiced detection works in all WoW client languages: English, Portuguese, German, French, Spanish (EU & LA), Italian, Korean, Russian, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional).

TTS Engines

Engine	Quality	Offline	Setup
Edge	High	No	Works out of the box
Kokoro	High	Yes	Auto-downloads 350MB model
OpenAI	Very High	No	Requires API key
ElevenLabs	Very High	No	Requires API key
Piper	Good	Yes	Lightweight and fast
System	Varies	Yes	Uses OS text-to-speech