# About the Mimic category

**URL:** https://community.openconversational.ai/t/about-the-mimic-category/396
**Category:** Mimic
**Created:** [February 9, 2016, 10:55pm UTC](https://community.openconversational.ai/t/about-the-mimic-category/396 "2016-02-09T22:55:33Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![gez-mycroft](https://community.openconversational.ai/user_avatar/community.openconversational.ai/gez-mycroft/32/1937_2.png) [@gez-mycroft](https://community.openconversational.ai/u/gez-mycroft)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2016, 10:55pm UTC](https://community.openconversational.ai/t/about-the-mimic-category/396/1 "2016-02-09T22:55:33Z")

</div>

_Mimic 3 has been replaced by Piper TTS, which has a thread in the TTS category_

This category is all about Mimic TTS - our family of text-to-speech engines.

**Mimic 3** is a privacy-focused open-source neural Text to Speech (TTS) engine that can run faster than real-time on low-end devices like the Raspberry Pi 4. In human terms that means it sounds great, it can run completely offline or in the cloud, and you can verifiably trust it.

**Mimic 2** is our older machine learning TTS engine designed to run in the cloud. It has been the default voice for most installations of Mycroft for many years.

**Mimic 1** is a fast, light-weight TTS engine based on Carnegie Mellon University’s FLITE software. It concatenates speech sounds to create complete phrases.

**Mimic Recording Studio** simplifies the collection of voice training data from individuals, by allowing you to speak and record phrases from a corpus. This data can then be used to train a voice model using Mimic 3, Mimic 2, or another machine learning TTS engine.

For more information about all of these, see the Mimic section of our documentation:

> **[Mimic TTS](https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/mycroft-technologies/mimic-tts)**
>
> Mimic is Mycroft AI's family of Text to Speech engines.