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XTTS-v2, Fish Speech stumble on Bulgarian
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REDDIT · REDDIT// 21d agoNEWS

XTTS-v2, Fish Speech stumble on Bulgarian

A Reddit user spent a day trying to build a local Bulgarian audiobook voice clone on Windows 11 with an RTX 5070 Ti. XTTS-v2 produced audio but sounded Russian, Fish Speech 1.5 still had Windows loading issues, and ElevenLabs was the only service they found that supports Bulgarian natively.

// ANALYSIS

This is a good reality check for anyone assuming local TTS is just a model download away. For Bulgarian specifically, the bottleneck is language coverage, packaging friction, and Windows/CUDA pain more than raw hardware.

  • XTTS-v2 is a poor fit for Bulgarian out of the box; forcing `language="ru"` is a hack that predictably hurts accent quality and voice similarity.
  • Fish Speech looks better on paper for Cyrillic, but the user ran into the part that breaks most local projects: runtime and model-loading issues, especially on Windows.
  • Blackwell + nightly PyTorch is still a rough edge for developers trying to stay on the bleeding edge of local AI audio.
  • Long-form audiobook narration magnifies every weakness in pronunciation, consistency, and install reliability, so small TTS flaws become deal-breakers fast.
  • ElevenLabs already supports Bulgarian, which makes the open-source/local path feel viable mainly for tinkerers, not for someone who just wants a finished audiobook pipeline.
// TAGS
xtts-v2fish-audioelevenlabsspeechopen-sourceself-hostedgpu

DISCOVERED

21d ago

2026-03-21

PUBLISHED

22d ago

2026-03-21

RELEVANCE

7/ 10

AUTHOR

Binqta