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We believe OSS models will win, not just in LLMs but also in multimodal: starting with speech :)
This is really cool work! I'm curious like what do you see as the biggest lever for speeding up TTS models or from a technical perspective that this was a promising direction in the first place to push on. If I were to guess, some distillation but I'm certain there are probably TTS model aware architectural changes that just make inference wayyyy faster?
> and Qwen3-ASR

Is the ASR inference engine open source as well?

Yes, and it is very good one. Leading position on private leaderboard on HF: https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard
I meant the Nari inference engine for Qwen3-ASR. I'm aware that Qwen3-ASR is open source, but I don't see a repo under https://github.com/nari-labs for nari-qwen3-asr or similar.

The Huggingface link on https://narilabs.com/product/stt/ links to https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-1.7B , not anything under https://huggingface.co/nari-labs

the qwen3-asr inference repo is not OSSed as of now. we're planning to write a paper or tech report on it as it contains some general techniques for ASR inference.
how do I follow you? I have a small 5090 doing inference all the time and I barely use tts but a lot of asr, mostly whisper, I ported your tech report for tts and implemented some improvements on my whisper inference based on your tech report as well!

would love to talk sometime!

They have a number of demos and examples in their HF space

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/spaces

I saw a local-ai demo (something + gemma), where the person used ASR to get text and gemma to clean it up (like turning "question mark" into a literal "?", bullet points another one). The presenter also showed a gemma only option, that did both in one go, but had a higher WER on average, and even though the formatting statements were handled without a multi-stage pipeline, they preferred the multi-stage overall

For some reason it switched voices half way through a 33 second clip.

For OP the clip name is nari-nina-01a0a12f-980a-765e-8029-fa56bd23210d.wav

hey, thanks for letting us know! will look into the issue and see what went wrong.
You definitely need independent evals by Datapoint AI or someone who can verify your claims about TTS quality
By next month the competition for TTS will be even more!

Voice models are not winner take all market unlike LLM APIs

Coming here as Developer Relations at AssemblyAI

All TTS generations are too fast. It's almost I'm listening to a podcast on 1.25-1.5x speed.
thanks for the feedback! will investigate and get it fixed
https://apimade.com/audio-compare.html

Added it to my blind TTS model comparison leaderboard. So far Darwin TTS is the open model leading the pack, ElevenLabs is at the lead.

Is Darwin TTS from Fish Audio? It wasn't clear when I searched for it.