Post
5980
I just released Inflect-Nano-v1, an ultra-small 4.63 parameter text-to-speech model.
The main idea is simple: instead of only making the acoustic model tiny and relying on a larger external vocoder, Inflect-Nano-v1 keeps the complete text-to-waveform stack under 5M parameters.
Quick facts:
- 4.63M total inference parameters
- 3.46M acoustic model
- 1.17M vocoder
- 24 kHz audio
- English-only
- Single male voice
- Runs locally with a simple PyTorch inference script
Why I made it:
Most modern TTS models are much larger, and even many “small TTS” projects depend on a separate vocoder. I wanted to see how far a complete tiny TTS stack could be pushed while still producing usable speech.
It is not SOTA, and I am not trying to claim it competes with large TTS systems. The interesting part is the size-to-functionality ratio.
What works:
It can generate arbitrary English speech locally, and the model is small enough to be interesting for:
- local voice assistants
- embedded/edge experiments
- browser or WASM-style TTS exploration
- efficient inference research
- tiny-model baselines
Limitations:
The quality is still limited. It can sound robotic, stumble on difficult unseen text, and the vocoder is still a clear bottleneck. Long or unusual prompts are less reliable.
So I would frame this as a research/demo release, not a production TTS engine.
I’d love feedback from people interested in:
- tiny speech models
- vocoders
- local TTS
- efficient inference
- embedded speech synthesis
- improving small-model generalization
If people find it useful, I’m interested in putting more training budget into a stronger v2.
Model page:
owensong/Inflect-Nano-v1
The main idea is simple: instead of only making the acoustic model tiny and relying on a larger external vocoder, Inflect-Nano-v1 keeps the complete text-to-waveform stack under 5M parameters.
Quick facts:
- 4.63M total inference parameters
- 3.46M acoustic model
- 1.17M vocoder
- 24 kHz audio
- English-only
- Single male voice
- Runs locally with a simple PyTorch inference script
Why I made it:
Most modern TTS models are much larger, and even many “small TTS” projects depend on a separate vocoder. I wanted to see how far a complete tiny TTS stack could be pushed while still producing usable speech.
It is not SOTA, and I am not trying to claim it competes with large TTS systems. The interesting part is the size-to-functionality ratio.
What works:
It can generate arbitrary English speech locally, and the model is small enough to be interesting for:
- local voice assistants
- embedded/edge experiments
- browser or WASM-style TTS exploration
- efficient inference research
- tiny-model baselines
Limitations:
The quality is still limited. It can sound robotic, stumble on difficult unseen text, and the vocoder is still a clear bottleneck. Long or unusual prompts are less reliable.
So I would frame this as a research/demo release, not a production TTS engine.
I’d love feedback from people interested in:
- tiny speech models
- vocoders
- local TTS
- efficient inference
- embedded speech synthesis
- improving small-model generalization
If people find it useful, I’m interested in putting more training budget into a stronger v2.
Model page:
owensong/Inflect-Nano-v1