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# Brenna now talks: Aaron Aldana’s site assistant gets an open-source voice
- URL: https://www.activateglobalmedia.com/brenna-now-talks-aaron-aldanas-site-assistant-gets-an-open-source-voice/
- Published: 2026-10-18T06:49:03.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-18T21:32:25.000Z
- Description: The assistant on aaronaldana.com now speaks with Kokoro, an open-source voice model running on his own server instead of a paid voice service.
- Author: Hirab Shabi
- Tags: AI & Automation, Aaron Aldana

Brenna, the AI assistant at the bottom of [aaronaldana.com](https://aaronaldana.com/?ref=activateglobalmedia.com), now answers out loud in a natural voice — and the voice runs on an open-source model on Aaron Aldana's own server, not a paid voice service.

## Why it matters

Natural-sounding speech used to mean paying a voice provider for every sentence, which gets expensive for an assistant that talks to every visitor. Open-source speech models have closed most of that gap. Brenna is a small, real example of a business swapping a metered service for a model it runs itself.

## How it works

- **The model:** Kokoro, an 82-million-parameter open-source text-to-speech model, released under the Apache 2.0 licence.
- **The voice:** one of Kokoro's built-in voices, chosen by Aldana for sounding closest to a real person.
- **Where it runs:** a small service of its own, with the model built into it, so there is no per-sentence bill and no outside service holding the recordings.
- **Speed:** replies are spoken a sentence at a time, so Brenna starts talking before the whole answer has been turned into audio.
- **Fallback:** if the voice service is ever unavailable, Brenna falls back to the browser's built-in voice instead of going silent.

## What Brenna does

Brenna answers questions about Aldana's work — [Creai](https://www.creai.dev/?ref=activateglobalmedia.com), [Arbi](https://arbi.creai.dev/?ref=activateglobalmedia.com), [Activate](https://activate.creai.dev/?ref=activateglobalmedia.com) and the rest — and can take a project brief and turn it into a proposal request, so a visitor can go from a question to a conversation about working together without filling in a form.

Try it at [aaronaldana.com](https://aaronaldana.com/?ref=activateglobalmedia.com). More from Activate Global Media on [Aaron Aldana](https://www.activateglobalmedia.com/tag/aaron-aldana/).