Search: “text-to-speech”

Show HN: Nari Qwen3-TTS and Qwen3-ASR – High accuracy, low latency and cost

Nari Labs claims top Coval voice AI benchmark rankings with low-latency, low-cost Qwen3-ASR and Qwen3-TTS inference endpoints.

Nari Labs says its Qwen3-ASR Fast endpoint ranks #1 in Coval's time-to-final-segment latency (p50 44 ms) with 3.6% WER at $0.12/hour, behind only AssemblyAI Universal 3.5 Pro on accuracy. Its Qwen3-TTS Fast ranks #2 in time-to-first-audio (p50 63 ms) and #1 in WER at 3.8%, priced at $10 per 1M characters. The company reports beating the official Qwen3 TTS Flash Realtime endpoint (8.8% WER, 692 ms median TTFA) and Baseten's dedicated endpoint (6.0% WER, 101 ms). Public beta APIs are moving to paid general availability with $20 in credits for existing accounts.

Hacker News · security·Sep 14, 16:07 UTC · 2d agoAI tools & infraHN 21↑ · 7 comments

BreezeBlue/Breeze-TTS-2 — new model trending #19 on Hugging Face

BreezeBlue open-weights Breeze TTS 2, a bilingual text-to-speech model it ranks #1 among open-weight models on the Artificial Analysis TTS leaderboard.

BreezeBlue released open weights and Apache 2.0-licensed PyTorch inference code for Breeze TTS 2 on 2026-08-25. The text-to-speech model supports English and Chinese, voice cloning, reference-free voice design, voice direction, and inline vocal events like (laugh) and (sigh). Reported performance includes #1 open-weight ranking on the Artificial Analysis Elo leaderboard, under 40 ms time-to-first-audio, a 0.32 real-time factor on an NVIDIA H100, and about 7.7 GiB GPU memory for eager inference.

Hugging Face trending models·Aug 25, 16:39 UTC · 22d agoModel release

Flirty OnlyFans promoters on X may be using AI to appear human

Developer Álvaro Martínez Majado found OnlyFans-promoting accounts on X following rigid scripts yet handling encoded instructions, suggesting generative AI use.

Investigation of flirty X accounts promoting OnlyFans pages showed near-identical openers across accounts plus dynamic behaviors: answering a hexadecimal-encoded instruction with "Pineapple" and failing an exact 12-character count test in an LLM-like pattern. The accounts also sent personalized voice notes reading supplied timestamps and usernames, consistent with automated text-to-speech. Evidence suggests a hybrid scripted/AI system, though no model, provider, or operator was identified.

Malwarebytes Labs·Sep 7, 11:18 UTC · 9d agoAI safety & security

Your photo could be all AI needs to clone your voice

Help Net Security·Oct 30, 00:00 UTC · Oct 30, 2025AI research

LACE: Layer-Wise Compression for Dynamic Frame Rate Codecs

LACE introduces layer-wise compression for dynamic frame rate audio codecs, cutting sequence lengths and speeding TTS inference while preserving quality.

LACE (Layer-Adaptive Codec Encoding) applies an independent compression step at each quantization layer of a neural audio codec, enabling layer-specific segmentation boundaries instead of shared ones. Union alignment and boundary anchor mechanisms keep durations consistent for downstream text-to-speech. On LibriTTS, LACE achieves a better rate-quality tradeoff than prior dynamic frame rate codecs and improves TTS inference efficiency at competitive synthesis quality. Code is released in the ESPnet3 codec recipe.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 17:46 UTC · 1d agoAI research1

AI for everyone in every language

Google says its AI now spans 300+ languages reaching 7 billion people, unveiling Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, Live Translate, and TranslateGemma models.

Google announced its technologies now support more than 300 languages spoken by 7 billion people, 86% of the global population. Gemini 3.5 Live Translate powers real-time spoken translation across 70 languages and 2,000+ language pairs, while Gemini 3.5 Transcribe is its most precise speech-to-text model. Its Universal Speech Model was trained on 12 million hours of audio using cross-lingual transfer learning, and TranslateGemma is a family of lightweight open translation models covering 55 languages that run on-device. Open-data partnerships include WAXAL covering 27 Sub-Saharan African languages and Project Vaani with 30,000+ hours of speech across 109 languages.

Google · AI·Sep 15, 16:00 UTC · 1d agoAI industry

StepAudio 3 Gen Technical Report

StepAudio 3 Gen unifies TTS, voice design, music, and sound effects via discrete autoregressive modeling over RVQ tokens.

StepAudio 3 Gen is a general-purpose audio generation model covering zero-shot TTS, voice design, vocal generation, sound effects, music, vibe speech, and mixed audio in one framework. It uses discrete autoregressive modeling over residual vector quantization (RVQ) tokens rather than the diffusion Transformer paradigm, with a StepAudio Tokenizer representing audio at 12.5 Hz in a shared 16x2048 residual code space. Key design principles include interference-aware progressive pretraining, an RVQ Adaptor for multi-codebook acoustic representations, and shared discrete autoregressive modeling. The model reports state-of-the-art performance on TTS and voice design while retaining strong generation across speech, vocals, sound effects, and music.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 10, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research

India’s Pocket FM doubles revenue run rate to $500M as AI powers 93% of audio content

Indian audio platform Pocket FM doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $500M, with AI now producing 93% of its catalog.

Pocket FM, an Indian serialized audio storytelling platform, doubled its annualized revenue run rate to $500 million in a year, with AI powering 93% of its catalog and 99% of new content. The company says generative AI, including in-house creative-writing and text-to-speech models, made production roughly 80 times cheaper, letting 550,000+ creators produce about 2.5 million hours of content annually across 770,000 audio series for 250 million listeners. Parent Pocket Entertainment is reportedly in talks to raise $100-120 million at about a $2 billion valuation, is profitable on an adjusted basis, and its AI-only microdrama app Pocket Saga has reached a $15 million annualized run rate.

TechCrunch · AI·Sep 10, 17:45 UTC · 6d agoAI industry

Build more natural voice experiences with GPT‑Live‑1 in the API

OpenAI releases GPT-Live-1 in the API, a full-duplex voice model that handles interruptions natively and delegates reasoning to backend models.

OpenAI launched GPT-Live-1 in the API, a single-model full-duplex voice system that listens and speaks simultaneously, replacing chained STT-LLM-TTS architectures. It improves Full Duplex Bench performance by 30 percentage points over GPT-Realtime-2.1 and ranks #1 on Tau3 when paired with GPT-6 Astra at medium reasoning effort. Early partner Speak reported nearly 80% fewer interruptions in language tutoring. The API release costs $0.05 per minute for the front-end voice layer and supports telephony, native ASR transcripts, keyword biasing, and expanded voice and language options.

OpenAI News·Sep 10, 00:00 UTC · 7d agoModel release1

Gradium Launches Voice Design: Write a Prompt, Get a Brand New Synthetic Voice in Seconds

Gradium, a Kyutai spinout, launched Voice Design, generating custom synthetic voices from text descriptions in seconds across five languages.

Gradium, a Paris-based voice AI company spun out of Kyutai, launched Voice Design, which generates new synthetic voices from 1-500 character text descriptions in seconds without needing reference audio or speaker consent. The feature is live in the Gradium API and Studio, free on every plan including the free tier, and kept voices run on the standard streaming TTS endpoint at the same latency as catalog voices. Vendor-run blind pairwise listening tests across 7,627 comparisons report a 72.6% win rate, 13.6 points ahead of ElevenLabs at 59.0%, placing first in all five tested languages, with the largest margins on regional accents such as Quebecois French (97%).

MarkTechPost·Sep 9, 07:29 UTC · 7d agoAI industry

[AINews] Muse Spark 1.3 matches GPT-5.6-Sol, confirming Meta Superintelligence as the newest Frontier Lab, >90% discount for training

Meta's Muse Spark 1.3 reportedly ranks as the world's #3 model, matching frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic with planned open weights.

The Latent Space AI News roundup leads with Muse Spark 1.3, promised in Zuckerberg's letter, which ranks #3 worldwide per AAII, is slated for open weights, and uses a pricing model over 90% cheaper when users opt in to training. The issue also covers the rumored Gemini 3.8 Flash launch and analysis arguing OpenAI's rumored looped-transformer 'Astra' architecture is a modest tweak rather than a breakthrough. Additional coverage includes ByteDance Seed's HarnessDev harness-evaluation benchmark, a retrieval-invoked actual-use evaluation method, Stanford's revamped agent engineering curricula, and Photon 2.1 adding TTS models and NVIDIA B200 support.

Latent Space·Sep 3, 04:38 UTC · 14d agoModel release1