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qwenlm/qwen3-tts

11,336PythonAudience · developerComplexity · 3/5Setup · hard

TLDR

Qwen3-TTS is a set of open-source AI text-to-speech models from Alibaba that convert text to natural speech in 10 languages, with voice cloning, text-described voice styles, and streaming output starting in under 100 milliseconds.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((qwen3-tts))
    What it does
      Text to speech
      10 languages
      Voice cloning
    Voice Types
      Described voice style
      Voice clone from sample
      9 premium voices
    Models
      0.6B fast model
      1.7B quality model
      Streaming output
    Deploy
      Python package
      vLLM server
      Alibaba Cloud API
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Generate spoken audio from text in 10 languages for a voice assistant, podcast tool, or accessibility feature

USE CASE 2

Clone a specific speaker's voice from a 3-second audio sample to produce personalized speech output

USE CASE 3

Describe a voice in plain text (age, gender, accent, emotion) and generate matching speech without a pre-recorded sample

USE CASE 4

Stream real-time text-to-speech into an application with under 100ms latency to the first audio packet

Tech stack

PythonPyTorchvLLM

Getting it running

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1h+

Requires a capable GPU for local inference, a hosted API is available via Alibaba Cloud for those without GPU hardware.

In plain English

Qwen3-TTS is a collection of open-source text-to-speech models built by the Qwen team at Alibaba Cloud. The models take written text as input and produce spoken audio as output, covering ten languages: Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. Several regional dialect voice profiles are also included. The collection ships multiple model variants tuned for different tasks. One variant lets you describe a voice in plain text (age, gender, accent, emotion) and the model generates audio in that style. Another variant clones an existing voice from a short three-second audio sample, so you can reproduce a specific speaker's sound. A third variant offers nine pre-built premium voices with controllable style. All variants support streaming output, meaning audio can start playing almost immediately rather than waiting for the full clip to render. The README highlights a latency figure of 97 milliseconds from the moment text arrives to the first audio packet being sent out. The underlying architecture avoids some common two-stage designs (a language model feeding a separate diffusion model) in favor of a single end-to-end approach, which the team says reduces errors that can creep in when two separate systems are chained together. Two model sizes are available: 0.6B and 1.7B parameters. Smaller models run faster and need less hardware, larger models generally produce higher-quality or more controllable output. The models can be loaded through the qwen-tts Python package or through vLLM, a popular high-throughput inference server. Fine-tuning on custom data is also supported for teams that need a specialized voice style. A hosted API is available via Alibaba Cloud for those who do not want to run the models locally. The repository includes a local web demo, code examples for each major use case, and links to model weights on Hugging Face and ModelScope. The full README is longer than what was shown.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Using the qwen-tts Python package, show me how to generate an MP3 file from a paragraph of English text using one of the 9 premium pre-built voices. Include the install command and the full code.
Prompt 2
I have a 3-second voice recording of a person speaking. Using Qwen3-TTS voice cloning, show me the Python code to generate new speech in that person's voice from a text string.
Prompt 3
I want to run Qwen3-TTS through vLLM for high-throughput text-to-speech generation. Show me the server startup command and the Python client code to send a text request and receive audio back.
Prompt 4
Using Qwen3-TTS, I want to describe a voice as a middle-aged calm British male and generate speech from a 2-sentence paragraph. Show me the Python code to use the text-described voice feature.
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