Qwen3-TTS family is now open sourced: Voice design, clone, and generation

Only if you focus on the form instead of the content. For a long time my family has had secret words and phrases we use to identify ourselves to each other over secure, but unauthenticated, channels (i.e. the channel is encrypted, but the source is unknown). The military has had to deal with this for some time, and developed various form of IFF that allies could use to identify themselves. E.g. for returning aircraft, a sequence of wing movements that identified you as friend. I think for a small group (in this case, loved ones), this could be one mitigation of that risk. My parents did this with me as a kid, ostensibly as a defense against some other adult saying "My mom sent me to pick you up...". I never did hear of that happening, though.

For now you could ask them to turn away from the camera while keeping their eyes open. If they are a Z-Image they will instantly snap their head to face you.

> as anything digital can be brushed off as “that’s not evidence, it could be AI generated”.

This won't change anything about Western style courts which have always required an unbroken chain of custody of evidence for evidence to be admissable in court

this was already possible with chatterbox for a long while.

That's a reupload of Cybergem's video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY

Oh wow. Thank you for this. Amazing, terrifying, spot on, all of it.

> Far more terrifying is Big Tech having access to a closed version of the same model

Agreed. The only thing worse than everyone having access to this tech is only governments, mega corps and highly-motivated bad actors having access. They've had it a while and there's no putting the genii back in the bottle. The best thing the rest of us can do is use it widely so everyone can adapt to this being the new normal.

I do strongly agree. Though the societal impact is only mitigated by open models, not curtailed at all.

The really terrifying thing is the next logical step from the instinctual reaction. Eschew miracle, eschew the cognitive bias of feeling warm and fuzzy for the guy who gives you it for free.

Socratic version: how can the Chinese companies afford to make them and give them out for free? Cui bono?

n.b. it's not because they're making money on the API, ex. open openrouter and see how Moonshot or DeepSeek's 1st party inference speed compares to literally any other provider. Note also that this disadvantage can't just be limited to LLMs, due to GPU export rules.

>Far more terrifying is Big Tech having access to a closed version of the same models, in the hands of powerful people with a history of unethical behavior (i.e. Zuckerberg's "Dumb Fucks" comments).

Lol what exactly do you think Zuck would do with your voice, drain your bank account??

That's the idea behind C2PA[1], your camera and the tools put a signature on the media to prove its provenance. That doesn't make manipulation impossible (e.g. you could photograph an AI image of a screen), but it does give you a trail of where a photo came from and thus an easier way to filter it or lookup the original.

[1] https://c2pa.org/

How would NFTs/web3 help differentiate between something created by a human and something that a human created with AI and then tagged with their signature using those tools?

I'm not denigrating the tech, all I'm saying is that we've crossed to new territory and there will be consequences that we don't understand from this. The same way that social media has been particularly detrimental to young people (especially women) in a way we were not ready for. This __smells__ like it could be worse, alongside with (or regardless of) the benefits of both.

I simply think people don't really know that the new world requires a new set of rules of engagement for anything that exists behind a screen (for now).

We'll be okay eventually, when society adapts to this and becomes fully aware of the capabilities and the use cases for abuse. But, that may take some time. The parent is right to be concerned about the interim, at the very least.

That said, I am likewise looking forward to the cool things to come out of this.

> We're going to be okay.

> And there will be incredible benefits that come out of this.

Your username is echelon.

I just wanted to point that out.

Yeah. Not using voice, but...https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/white-house-posts-fa...

> Nothing was more scary than the invention of the nuclear weapon. And we're all still here.

Except that building a nuclear weapon was not available to everyone, certainly not to dumb people whose brain have been feeded with social media content.

> People that couldn't sing will make music.

I was with you, until

But, yeah. Life will go on.

I just followed the Quickstart[1] in the GitHub repo, refreshingly straight forward. Using the pip package worked fine, as did installing the editable version using the git repository. Just install the CUDA version of PyTorch[2] first.

The HF demo is very similar to the GitHub demo, so easy to try out.

  pip install torch torchvision --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu128
  pip install qwen3-tts
  qwen-tts-demo Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-Base --no-flash-attn --ip 127.0.0.1 --port 8000

Skipped FlashAttention since I'm on Windows and I haven't gotten FlashAttention 2 to work there yet (I found some precompiled FA3 files[3] but Qwen3-TTS isn't FA3 compatible yet).

[1]: https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-TTS?tab=readme-ov-file#quick...

[2]: https://pytorch.org/get-started/locally/

[3]: https://windreamer.github.io/flash-attention3-wheels/

The demo uses 6GB dedicated VRAM on Windows, but keep in mind that it's without FlashAttention. I expect it would drop a bit if I got that working.

Haven't looked into the demo to see if it could be optimized by moving certain bits to CPU for example.

Thanks, so it’s in the [pretty close but still distinguishable] range.

The original script supports CPU inference, nonetheless.

Something 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.

An RTF above 1 for just 0.6B parameters suggests the bottleneck isn't the GPU, even on a 1080. The raw compute should be much faster. I'd bet it's mostly CPU overhead or an issue with the serving implementation.

you can install flash attention, et al, but if you're on windows, afaik, you can't use/run/install "triton kernels", which apparently make audio models scream. Whisper complains every time i start it, and it is pretty slow; so i just batch hundreds of audio files on a machine in the corner with a 3060 instead. technically i could batch them on a CPU, too, since i don't particularly care when they finish.

Neat! That's really cool. I'll definitely reach out once I'm ready to move forward on it. Got a few high-priority things sucking up all my free time at the moment :-(

Yeah all my radio plays are from OTRR now. I bought a number of different "collections" from different sources but none of them come even close to the quality and care that the OTRR people have.

Also, always a pleasure to meet someone else who loves old-time radio :-D

What are some of your favorites? Probably my favorite is Abbott & Costello, followed by Have Gun - Will Travel and Gunsmoke. I like the Lone Ranger too but am only a few hours into it so far.

p.s. I am indeed a dude named Ben!

I'm in the same boat. Sonnet was overkill for me, and GLM is cheap and smart enough to spit out boilerplate and FFMPEG commands whenever it's asked.

$20/month is a bit of an insane ask when the most valuable thing Anthropic makes is the free Claude Code CLI.

Are you using an API proxy to route GLM into the Claude Code CLI? Or do you mean side-by-side usage? Not sure if custom endpoints are supported natively yet.

I much prefer OpenCode these days, give it a try.

I think the least politically divisive issue within the US is concern about China’s growth as it directly threatens the US’s ability to set the world’s agenda. It may be politically divisive if you are aligned with Chinese interests but I don’t see anything politically divisive for a US audience. I expect Chinese CEOs speak in similar terms to a Chinese audience in terms of making sure they’re decoupled from the now unstable US political machine.

I mean, there's no way it's about this right?

Being critical of favorable actions towards a rival country shouldn't be divisive, and if it is, well, I don't think the problem is in the criticism.

Also the link doesn't mention open source? From a google search, he doesn't seem to care much for it.

From the perspective of competing against China in terms of AI the argument against open models makes sense to me. It’s a terrible problem to have really. Ideally we should all be able to work together in the sandbox towards a better tomorrow but thats not reality.

I prefer to have more open models. On the other hand China closes up their open models once they start to show a competitive edge.

It's mostly trying out my orchestration system (https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator and https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-orchestrator-action) in a repo using GH_PAT.

Stuff like this: https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator-e2e-test...

Yes, the idea is to really, fully automate software engineering. I don't know if I am going to be successful but I'm on vacation and having fun!

if Opus 4.5/GLM 4.7 can do so much already, I can only imagine what can be done in two years. Might as well adopt to this reality and learn how leverage this advancement

You may not like it but this is what a 10x developer looks like. :-)

I'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.

Amazingly, just yesterday, I had Opus 4.5 crap itself extensively on a fairly simple problem -- it was trying to override a column with an aggregation function while also using it in a group-by without referring to the original column by its full qualified name prefixed with the table -- and in typical Claude fashion it assembled an entire abstraction layer to try and hide the problem under, before finally giving up, deleting the column, and smugly informing me I didn't need it anyway.

That evening, for kicks, I brought the problem to GLM 4.7 Flash (Flash!) and it one-shot the right solution.

It's not apples to apples, because when it comes down to it LLMs are statistical token extruders, and it's a lot easier to extrude the likely tokens from an isolated query than from a whole workspace that's already been messed up somewhat by said LLM. That, and data is not the plural of anecdote. But still, I'm easily amused, and this amused me. (I haven't otherwise pushed GLM 4.7 much and I don't have a strong opinion about about it.)

But seriously, given the consistent pattern of knitting ever larger carpets to sweep errors under that Claude seems to exhibit over and over instead of identifying and addressing root causes, I'm curious what the codebases of people who use it a lot look like.

> I can't believe how bad it is

This has been my consistent experience with every model prior to Opus 4.5, and every single open model I've given a go.

Hopefully we will get there in another 6 months when Opus is distilled into new open models, but I've always been shocked at some of the claims around open models, when I've been entirely unable to replicate them.

Hell, even Opus 4.5 shits the bed with semi-regularity on anything that's not completely greenfield for my usage, once I'm giving it tasks beyond some unseen complexity boundary.

Agreed. I do think the metaphor still holds though.

A financial jackknifing of the AI industry seems to be one very plausible outcome as these promises/expectations of the AI companies starts meeting reality.

Not a great metric, research in academia doesn't necessarily translate to value. In the US they've poached so many academics because of how much value they directly translate to.

I don't doubt China wouldn't be capable of making SOTA models, however they are very heavily compute constrained. So they are forced to shortcut compute by riding the coattails of compute heavy models.

They need a training-multiplier breakthrough that would allow them to train SOTA models on on a fraction of the compute that the US does. And this would also have to be kept a secret and be well hidden (often multiple researchers from around the world put the pieces together on a problem at around the same time, so the breakthrough would have to be something pretty difficult to discover for the greatest minds in the field) to prevent the US from using it to multiply their model strength with their greater compute.

Volume is easy: they have far more people, it is quality that counts.

DeepSeek 3.2 is frankly fairly close to that. GLM 4.7 as well. They're basically around Sonnet 4 level.

Yes, 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.

The 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.

Just use that green guy, classical TTS ain't broke nanoda.