Apus supports Fish Audio in two distinct ways:

The downloadable S2 Pro weights use the Fish Audio Research License. Personal, research, and non-commercial evaluation are allowed; commercial use requires a separate Fish Audio license. Hosted API use follows Fish Audio's service terms.

Hosted S2.1

Install the fish-audio-speech plugin:

apus plugins install @openclaw/fish-audio-speech

The plugin id is fish-audio-speech. The provider and TTS configuration id remain fish-audio.

Set an API key from the Fish Audio API Keys page:

export FISH_API_KEY="..."

Then configure the provider:

{
  tts: {
    auto: "tagged",
    provider: "fish-audio",
    providers: {
      "fish-audio": {
        apiKey: "${FISH_API_KEY}",
        model: "s2.1-pro",
        // Optional saved or public Fish Audio voice model id:
        speakerVoiceId: "802e3bc2b27e49c2995d23ef70e6ac89",
        latency: "balanced",
      },
    },
  },
}

speakerVoiceId is optional. Without it, Fish Audio uses its default voice. FISH_AUDIO_API_KEY is also accepted for compatibility with existing community plugins, but FISH_API_KEY is the canonical Fish SDK environment variable.

Hosted models

Model Use
s2.1-pro Default. Production S2.1 service with the hosted service guarantees attached to your plan.
s2.1-pro-free Promotional S2.1 access that ended on August 31, 2026; no TTFA or DPA guarantees.
s2-pro Previous S2 generation.
s1 Previous generation with parenthesized emotion controls.

The provider requests MP3 for ordinary audio, Opus at 48 kHz for native voice notes, and raw PCM at 8 kHz for telephony. For Discord voice, Apus consumes Fish Audio's chunked HTTP response as it arrives instead of waiting for the entire clip.

Expressive speech

S2 and S2.1 accept inline natural-language tags. Put them in the spoken text:

[whisper] Keep this between us. [pause] [excited] We shipped it!

Common tags include [whisper], [laughing], [excited], [sad], [pause], and free-form instructions such as [professional broadcast tone].

Voice selection and cloning

Use /tts status to inspect the active provider and /tts audio <text> for a one-off clip. Fish voice ids can come from your own trained voices or the public Fish voice library. Apus lists your voices first, then a bounded page of popular public voices.

The speech provider consumes existing voice ids; it does not upload recordings or create voice models. Voice creation is a separate consent-sensitive action in the Fish Audio app or API.

Local S2 Pro on macOS

The native macOS app bundles an isolated MLX TTS helper. On Apple silicon, point the existing mlx Talk provider at the 8-bit Fish conversion:

{
  talk: {
    provider: "mlx",
    providers: {
      mlx: {
        modelId: "mlx-community/fish-audio-s2-pro-8bit",
      },
    },
  },
}

The first utterance downloads about 6.8 GB of model and codec data. Apus keeps one selected MLX model resident for repeated utterances, then unloads it after five idle minutes, app shutdown, or memory pressure.

Local reference voice

When the Gateway and macOS app share the same filesystem, configure a clean 10–30 second reference recording and its exact transcript:

{
  talk: {
    provider: "mlx",
    providers: {
      mlx: {
        modelId: "mlx-community/fish-audio-s2-pro-8bit",
        referenceAudioPath: "/Users/example/Voices/reference.wav",
        referenceText: "The exact words spoken in the reference recording.",
      },
    },
  },
}

referenceAudioPath is resolved on the Mac running the native app, not on a remote Gateway. The file stays local: the app passes it only to its isolated MLX helper. Local Fish output is streamed as PCM into Talk playback so speech can start before a long generation finishes.

Local MLX currently applies only to native macOS Talk. Other channels and clients use the Gateway-selected hosted speech provider. iOS and Android retain their existing native/system and Gateway Talk paths.

Troubleshooting

See the Fish Audio TTS API and Fish Audio Research License.