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AI · January 23, 2026

AA

Audio AI had a wild day – 5 major open-source / real-time TTS drops

The audio&#x2F;TTS space just moved fast. In the last week alone: NVIDIA – PersonaPlex-7B Open-source, full-duplex conversational speech model. Inworld AI – TTS-1.5 Realtime TTS (<250ms), $0.005&#x2F;min, currently #1 on Artificial Analysis. Flash Labs – Chroma 1.0 First open-source, end-to-end, real-time speech-to-speech model. Alibaba Qwen – Qwen3-TTS Fully open-sourced TTS family: Base, CustomVoice, VoiceDesign. Kyutai Labs – Pocket TTS Runs locally on a laptop. No GPU required. Feels like TTS is hitting the same acceleration moment LLMs had last year. Realtime, open-source, and local is…

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What it does

In the maker’s words, at launch

The audio&#x2F;TTS space just moved fast. In the last week alone: NVIDIA – PersonaPlex-7B Open-source, full-duplex conversational speech model. Inworld AI – TTS-1.5 Realtime TTS (<250ms), $0.005&#x2F;min, currently #1 on Artificial Analysis. Flash Labs – Chroma 1.0 First open-source, end-to-end, real-time speech-to-speech model. Alibaba Qwen – Qwen3-TTS Fully open-sourced TTS family: Base, CustomVoice, VoiceDesign. Kyutai Labs – Pocket TTS Runs locally on a laptop. No GPU required. Feels like TTS is hitting the same acceleration moment LLMs had last year. Realtime, open-source, and local is becoming the default. Curious what people here are building with this

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