Vilnius.js

VilniusJS is back! The industry is in the middle of an AI revolution, and the relevance of any single programming language is being questioned left and right. But platforms endure — and VilniusJS has always been about more than just the language. It's about browsers, Deno, Node, and the ever-growing world of JS runtimes. For this meetup, we're bringing it all together: the JS ecosystem and the AI wave — with a talk by Algimantas Krasauskas, an experienced engineer who's been building at the intersection of traditional and AI-assisted development.

📌 Schedule
18:30 Gathering, mingling, drinks and snacks
19:00 "kitten-tts: Real-time TTS on (almost) anything" by Algimantas Krasauskas
19:45 Hangout at Wix office

💬 kitten-tts: Real-time TTS on (almost) anything
Algimantas will walk through building kitten-tts — a JS port of KittenTTS that does real-time text-to-speech on pretty much anything, no GPU required. It hits ~6.8x faster throughput than kokoro-js, with near-perfect waveform parity against the original Python implementation. AI coding assistants were central to the whole process — from porting Python model logic to debugging numerical parity issues across runtimes, to iterating on the full voice loop (STT → processing → TTS). The focus was on end-to-end conversation latency, not isolated benchmarks, and on keeping things simple enough to daily-drive at home through a browser.
Expect real numbers, honest reflections on AI-assisted engineering — what worked, what didn't, and practical takeaways you can apply to your own projects.

Come for the talk, stay for the hangout 🍻

🗣️ Bio: Algimantas Krasauskas
Algimantas works at Wix, where he splits his time between platform engineering and seeing how far AI coding assistants can take a side project. Recent open-source work includes kitten-tts-js, Debugium (an LLM debugger built on the Debug Adapter Protocol), and Skillz — a self-extending MCP server.