Phonon TTS ranks first in speech synthesis benchmarks
Hugging Face: A Closer Look at Phonon TTS. Launching High-Quality On-Device Speech That Tops the Benchmarks.
Running speech synthesis locally on devices improves privacy and latency while reducing server infrastructure demands.
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A text-to-speech model called Phonon has been released that runs on individual devices rather than relying on cloud servers, meaning text and generated speech remain local to the user's machine. The model comes in two small sizes and supports five languages with over 100 built-in voices, while also handling elements like phone numbers and dates that other systems often struggle with. On the Hugging Face Open TTS Leaderboard, which compares text-to-speech models across metrics including intelligibility, speed, and naturalness, Phonon ranks first in some languages and in the top three across all tested languages despite being significantly smaller than competing models. The release includes an inference framework built specifically for Phonon and integration with the Transformers library, enabling developers to use it across various devices from phones to browsers.
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