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Qwen3-TTS family is now open sourced: Voice design, clone, and generation
- albertwang 9mo agogreat news, this looks great! is it just me, or do most of the english audio samples sound like anime voices?
- devttyeu 9mo agoAlso like some popular youtubers and popular speakers.
- pixl97 9mo agoHmm, wonder where they got their training data from?
- rapind 9mo ago> do most of the english audio samples sound like anime voices? 100% I was thinking the same thing.
- thehamkercat 9mo agoeven the Japanese audio samples sound like anime
- htrp 9mo agosubbed audio training data (much better than cc data) is better
- reactordev 9mo agoThe real value I see is being able to clone a voice and change timbre and characteristics of the voice to be able to quickly generate voice overs, narrations, voice acting, etc. It's superb!
- bityard 9mo agoWell, if you look at the prompts, they are basically told to sound like that. And if you ask me, I think these models were trained on tween fiction podcasts. (My kids listen to a lot of these and dramatic over-acting seems to be the industry standard.) Also, their middle-aged adult with an "American English" accent sounds like any American I've ever met. More like a bad Sean Connery impersonator.
- numpad0 9mo agoI suspect they might be using voice lines from Chinese gacha games in addition to what clearly sound like VTubers, YouTubers, and Chinese TV documentary narrations. Those games all come with clean monaural CN/JP/EN files consistent in contents across language for all regions, for, an obvious[1] reason. 1: https://old.reddit.com/r/ZenlessZoneZero/comments/1gqmtl1/the_jp_good_morning_is_just/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ZenlessZoneZero/comments/1gqmtl1/th...
- lostmsu 9mo agoI still don't know anyone who managed Qwen3-Omni to work properly on a local machine.
- throwaw12 9mo agoQwen team, please please please, release something to outperform and surpass the coding abilities of Opus 4.5. Although I like the model, I don't like the leadership of that company and how close it is, how divisive they're in terms of politics.
- amrrs 9mo agoHave you tried the new GLM 4.7?
- throwaw12 9mo agoyes I did, not on par with Opus 4.5. I use Opus 4.5 for planning, when I reach my usage limits fallback to GLM 4.7 only for implementing the plan, it still struggles, even though I configure GLM 4.7 as both smaller model and heavier model in claude code
- davely 9mo agoI've been using GLM 4.7 alongside Opus 4.5 and I can't believe how bad it is. Seriously. I spent 20 minutes yesterday trying to get GLM 4.7 to understand that a simple modal on a web page (vanilla JS and HTML!) wasn't displaying when a certain button was clicked. I hooked it up to Chrome MCP in Open Code as well. It constantly told me that it fixed the problem. In frustration, I opened Claude Code and just typed "Why won't the button with ID 'edit' work???!" It fixed the problem in one shot. This isn't even a hard problem (and I could have just fixed it myself but I guess sunk cost fallacy).
- bityard 9mo agoI've used a bunch of the SOTA models (via my work's Windsurf subscription) for HTML/CSS/JS stuff over the past few months. Mind you, I am not a web developer, these are just internal and personal projects. My experience is that all of the models seem to do a decent job of writing a whole application from scratch, up to a certain point of complexity. But as soon as you ask them for non-trivial modifications and bugfixes, they _usually_ go deep into rationalized rabbit holes into nowhere. I burned through a lot of credits to try them all and Gemini tended to work the best for the things I was doing. But as always, YMMV.
- indigodaddy 9mo agoHow does the cloning compare to pocket TTS?
- andhuman 9mo agoIt’s uncanny good. I prefer it to pocket, but then again pocket is much smaller and for realtime streaming.
- indigodaddy 9mo agoAh right I guess I meant for instant which I assume qwen can't do
- quinncom 9mo agoPocket TTS is much smaller: 100M parameters versus 600–1800M.
- indigodaddy 9mo agoAh right so I guess qwen3-tts isn't going to work for cpu-only like pocket TTS can(?)
- magicalhippo 9mo agoThe current code doesn't appear very optimized. Running on CPU-only it only uses four threads for example, nowhere close to saturating all my cores. As a result it's dog slow on CPU only, like 3-4 minutes to produce a 3 second clip, and still significantly less than real-time on my 5090 using only 30% of the GPU.
- genewitch 9mo agoit isn't often that tehcnology gives me chills, but this did it. I've used "AI" TTS tools since 2018 or so, and i thought the stuff from two years ago was about the best we were going to get. I don't know the size of these, i scrolled to the samples. I am going to get the models set up somewhere and test them out. Now, maybe the results were cherrypicked. i know everyone else who has released one of these cherrypicks which to publish. However, this is the first time i've considered it plausible to use AI TTS to remaster old radioplays and the like, where a section of audio is unintelligible but can be deduced from context, like a tape glitch where someone says "HEY [...]LAR!" and it's an episode of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar... I have dozens of hours of audio of like Bob Bailey and people of that era.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- kamranjon 9mo agoI wonder if it was trained on anime dubs cause all of the examples I listened to sounded very similar to a miyazaki style dub.
- genewitch 9mo agoscroll down to the second to last group, the second one down is obama speaking english, the third one down is trump speaking japanese (a translation of the english phrase) besides, they know what side their bread is buttered on. I feel like this is almost not the real announcement; or, the engineers that wrote this up and did the demos just ran it that way. The normal speech voices are fine (lower than the anime ones on the page.) i agree that the first few are very infantile. I'll change that word if i can think of a better one.
- freedomben 9mo agoIndeed, I have a future project/goal of "restoring" Have Gun - Will Travel radio episodes to listenable quality using tech like this. There are so many lines where sound effects and tape rot and other "bad recording" things make it very difficult to understand what was sad. Will be amazing, but as with all tech the potential for abuse is very real
- thedangler 9mo agoKind of a noob, how would I implement this locally? How do I pass it audio to process. I'm assuming its in the API spec?
- dust42 9mo agoScroll down on the Huggingface page, there are code examples and also a link to github: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-0.6B-Base https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-0.6B-Base
- daliusd 9mo agoI wanted to try this locally as well so I have asked AI to write CLI for me: https://github.com/daliusd/qtts https://github.com/daliusd/qtts There are some samples. If you have GPU you might want to fork and improve this, but otherwise slow, but usable on CPU as well.
- ideashower 9mo agoHuh. One of the English Voice Clone examples features Obama.
- subscribed 9mo agoDistinct, characteristic voice. My first to play with will be Morgan Freeman.
- illwrks 9mo agoI think the other sounds like Steve Jobs - I could be wrong though!
- wahnfrieden 9mo agoHow is it for Japanese?
- salzig 9mo agothere is a sample clone -> Trump speaks Japanese. Edit: "Cross-lingual Voice Clone" https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3tts-0115#voice-clone https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3tts-0115#voice-clone
- numpad0 9mo agoThe demo page only has three samples for Japanese, and one of it pronounces taskete as itsukete(???), so...
- wahnfrieden 9mo agoThanks. All modern TTS for Japanese are useless failures.
- numpad0 9mo agoJust use that green guy, classical TTS ain't broke nanoda.
- wahnfrieden 9mo agoI’m building Manabi Reader and would need to contact them for an enterprise contract. Annoying licensing but maybe inevitable
- simonw 9mo agoIf you want to try out the voice cloning yourself you can do that an this Hugging Face demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS - switch to the "Voice Clone" tab, paste in some example text and use the microphone option to record yourself reading that text - then paste in other text and have it generate a version of that read using your voice. I shared a recording of audio I generated with that here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/22/qwen3-tts/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/22/qwen3-tts/
- javier123454321 9mo agoThis is terrifying. With this and z-image-turbo, we've crossed a chasm. And a very deep one. We are currently protected by screens, we can, and should assume everything behind a screen is fake unless rigorously (and systematically, i.e. cryptographically) proven otherwise. We're sleepwalking into this, not enough people know about it.
- rdtsc 9mo agoThat was my thought too. You’d have “loved ones” calling with their faces and voices asking for money in some emergency. But you’d also have plausible deniability as anything digital can be brushed off as “that’s not evidence, it could be AI generated”.
- neevans 9mo agothis was already possible with chatterbox for a long while.
- freedomben 9mo agoYep, this has been the reality now for years. Scammers have already had access to it. I remember an article years ago about a grandma who wired her life savings to a scammer who claimed to have her granddaughter held hostage in a foreign country. Turns out they just cloned her voice from Facebook data and knew her schedule so timed it while she would be unreachable by phone.
- rahimnathwani 9mo agoHas anyone successfully run this on a Mac? The installation instructions appear to assume an NVIDIA GPU (CUDA, FlashAttention), and I’m not sure whether it works with PyTorch’s Metal/MPS backend.
- javier123454321 9mo agoI recommend using modal for renting the metal.
- magicalhippo 9mo agoFWIW you can run the demo without FlashAttention using --no-flash-attn command-line parameter, I do that since I'm on Windows and haven't gotten FlashAttention2 to work.
- turnsout 9mo agoIt seems to depend on FlashAttention, so the short answer is no. Hopefully someone does the work of porting the inference code over!
- Lichtso 9mo agoYes, using mlx-audio. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46726440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46726440
- rahimnathwani 9mo agoThanks! Simon's example uses the custom voice model (creating a voice from instructions). But that comment led me eventually to this page, which shows how to use mlx-audio for custom voices: https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-0.6B-Base-bf16 https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-0.6B-Bas... uv tool install --force git+https://github.com/Blaizzy/mlx-audio.git --prerelease=allow python -m mlx_audio.tts.generate --model mlx-community/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-0.6B-Base-bf16 --text "Hello, this is a test." --ref_audio path_to_audio.wav --ref_text "Transcript of the reference audio." --play
- satvikpendem 9mo agoThis would be great for audiobooks, some of the current AI TTS still struggle.
- PunchyHamster 9mo agoLooking forward for my grandma being scammed by one!
- JonChesterfield 9mo agoI see a lot of references to `device_map="cuda:0"` but no cuda in the github repo, is the complete stack flash attention plus this python plus the weights file, or does one need vLLM running as well?
- salzig 9mo agoSo now we're getting every movie in "original voice" but local language? Can't wait to view anime or Bollywood :D
- whinvik 9mo agoHaha something that I want to try out. I have started using voice input more and more instead of typing and now I am on my second app and second TTS model, namely Handy and Parakeet V3. Parakeet is pretty good, but there are times it struggles. Would be interesting to see how Qwen compares once Handy has it in.
- Footprint0521 9mo agoWhy parakeet over whisper v3 turbo? Just curious as one who heavily uses whisper, I’ve seemed to have better results with that
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- whinvik 9mo agoParakeet is much smaller and for me the perf/speed combo has just been better.
- woodson 9mo agoThis is about speech to text, not speech recognition.
- TheAceOfHearts 9mo agoInteresting model, I've managed to get the 0.6B param model running on my old 1080 and I can generated 200 character chunks safely without going OOM, so I thought that making an audiobook of the Tao Te Ching would be a good test. Unfortunately each snippet varies drastically in quality: sometimes the speaker is clear and coherent, but other times it bursts out laughing or moaning. In a way it feels a bit like magical roulette, never being quite certain of what you're going to get. It does have a bit of charm, when you chain the various snippets together you really don't know what direction it's gonna go. Using speaker Ryan seems to be the most consistent, I tried speaker Eric and it sounded like someone putting on a fake exaggerated Chinese accent to mock speakers. If it wasn't for the unpredictable level of emotions from each chunk, I'd say this is easily the highest quality TTS model I've tried.
- KaoruAoiShiho 9mo agoHave you tried specifying the emotion? There's an option to do so and if it's left empty it wouldn't surprise me if it defaulted to rng instead of bland.
- TheAceOfHearts 9mo agoFor the system prompt I used: > Read this in a calm, clear, and wise audiobook tone. > Do not rush. Allow the meaning to sink in. But maybe I should experiment with something more detailed. Do you have any suggestions?
- KaoruAoiShiho 9mo agoSomething like this: Character Name: Marcus Cole Voice Profile: A bright, agile male voice with a natural upward lift, delivering lines at a brisk, energetic pace. Pitch leans high with spark, volume projects clearly—near-shouting at peaks—to convey urgency and excitement. Speech flows seamlessly, fluently, each word sharply defined, riding a current of dynamic rhythm. Background: Longtime broadcast booth announcer for national television, specializing in live interstitials and public engagement spots. His voice bridges segments, rallies action, and keeps momentum alive—from voter drives to entertainment news. Presence: Late 50s, neatly groomed, dressed in a crisp shirt under studio lights. Moves with practiced ease, eyes locked on the script, energy coiled and ready. Personality: Energetic, precise, inherently engaging. He doesn’t just read—he propels. Behind the speed is intent: to inform fast, to move people to act. Whether it’s “text VOTE to 5703” or a star-studded tease, he makes it feel immediate, vital.
- jakobdabo 9mo agoCan anyone please provide directions/links to tools that can be run locally, and that take an audio recording of a voice as an input, and produce an output with the same voice saying the same thing with the same intonations, but with a fixed/changed accent? This is needed for processing an indie game's voice recordings, where the voice actors weren't native speakers and had some accent.
- sails 9mo agoAny recommendations for an iOS app to test models like this? There are a few good ones for text gen, and it’s a great way to try models
- bigyabai 9mo agoBesides UTM, no.
- swaraj 9mo agoTried the voice clone with a 30s trump clip (with reference text), and it didn't sound like him at all.
- girvo 9mo agoAmusingly one of their examples (the final Age Control example) is prompted to have American English as an accent, but sounds like an Australian trying to sounds American to my ear haha
- dangoodmanUT 9mo agoMany voices clone better than 11labs, while admitedly lower bitrate
- gunalx 9mo agoVoice actors are slo cooked. Some of the demos arguably sounded way better than a lot of indie voice-acting.
- simonw 9mo agoI got this running on macOS using mlx-audio thanks to Prince Canuma: https://x.com/Prince_Canuma/status/2014453857019904423 https://x.com/Prince_Canuma/status/2014453857019904423 Here's the script I'm using: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/python/q3_tts.py https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/python/q3_tts.py You can try it with uv (downloads a 4.5GB model on first run) like this: uv run https://tools.simonwillison.net/python/q3_tts.py \ 'I am a pirate, give me your gold!' \ -i 'gruff voice' -o pirate.wav
- gcr 9mo agoThis is wonderful, thank you. Another win for uv!
- indigodaddy 9mo agoSimon how do you think this would perform on CPU only? Lets say threadripper with 20G ram. (Voice cloning in particular)
- simonw 9mo agoNo idea at all, but my guess is it would work but be a bit slow. You'd need to use a different build of the model though, I don't think MLX has a CPU implementation.
- genewitch 9mo agothe old voice cloning and/or TTS models were CPU only, and they weren't realtime, but no worse than 2:1, 30 seconds of audio would take 60 seconds to generate. roughly. in 2021 one-shot TTS/cloning using GPUs was getting there, and that was close enough to realtime; one could, if one was willing to deal with it, wire microphone audio to the model, and speak words, and the model would, in real time, modify the voice. Phil Hendrie is jealous. anyhow, with faster CPUs and optimizations, you won't be waiting too long. Also 20GB is overkill for an audio model. Only text - LLM - are huge and take infinite memory. SD/FLUX models are under 16GB of ram usage (uh, mine are, at least!), for instance.
- genewitch 9mo ago
- anotherevan 9mo agoIs there any way to take a cloned voice model and plug into Android TTS and/or Windows? I have a friend with a paralysed larynx who is often using his phone or a small laptop to type in order to communicate. I know he would love it if it was possible to take old recordings of him speaking and use that to give him back "his" voice, at least in some small measure.
- 7777777phil 9mo agoHere is a Colab Notebook where you can test it on any of the available GPUs (H100, A100, T4): https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1szmNh25TmMpPd4aKjWXJXLlBX-FW9qXQ https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1szmNh25TmMpPd4aKjWX...
- viraptor 9mo agoI can't quite figure this out: Can you save a generated voice for reuse later? The mlx-audio I looked at seems to take the text itself in every interface and doesn't expose it as a separate object. (I can dive deeper, but wanted to check if anyone's done it already)
- akadeb 9mo agoYou could pipe the output to an audio file with ffmpeg or pyaudio and save it locally
- viraptor 9mo agoI don't want to save the audio. I want to save the voice model so I can use it for many different texts, for consistency.
- stuckkeys 9mo agoYes, you can. I was just testing it. I made a "My Custom Voices" tab, and recorded a small sample of my own voice or upload a sample of w/e voice. Then you can use it. I am in the process of training a model of my voice too to see how it handles it using the 1.7b Works surprisingly good with a 4090. I will also try it on 5090. This is the best one I have seen so far. NGL. 11Labs is cooked lol.
- naveen-zerocool 9mo agoI just created a video trying it out - https://youtu.be/0LU9nmnR0cs https://youtu.be/0LU9nmnR0cs
- chriswep 9mo agoIn my tests this doesn't come close to the years old coqui/XTTS-v2. It has great voice cloning capabilities and creates rich speech with emotions with low latency. I tried out several local-TTS projects over the years but i'm somewhat confused that nothing seems to be able to match coqui despite the leaps that we see in other areas of AI. Can somebody with more knowledge in this field explain why that might be? Or am i completely missing something?
- d4rkp4ttern 9mo agoCurious how it compares to last week’s release of Kyutai’s Pocket-TTS [1] which is just 100M params, and excellent in both speed and quality (English only). I use it in my voice plugin [2] for quick voice updates in Claude Code. [1] https://github.com/kyutai-labs/pocket-tts https://github.com/kyutai-labs/pocket-tts [2] https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools?tab=readme-ov-file#-voice-plugin https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools?tab=readme-o...
- sinnickal 9mo agoPrepare for an influx of sensational hot-mic clips allegedly from high profile people
- jonkoops 9mo agoHonestly, this seems like it could be pretty cool for video games. I always liked Oblivion's 'Radiant AI', this could be a natural progression, give characters motivations, relations with the player and other NPCs and have an LLM spit out background dialogue, then have another model generate the audio.
- khimaros 9mo agoi made an epub to audiobook generator using this with optional LLM integration for dramatized output: https://github.com/khimaros/autiobook https://github.com/khimaros/autiobook -- also submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46737968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46737968