REDDIT · REDDIT// 27d agoOPENSOURCE RELEASE

SILMA AI drops open-source Arabic-English TTS model

SILMA AI has released the weights of its 150M-parameter bilingual text-to-speech model under Apache 2.0, supporting both Modern Standard Arabic and English with voice cloning from under 8 seconds of audio. Built on the F5-TTS diffusion architecture and trained from scratch on tens of thousands of hours of audio, it runs at RTF ~0.12 on an RTX 4090.

// ANALYSIS

Arabic is a vastly underserved language in open-source TTS — SILMA filling that gap with a commercially-permissive, production-ready release is a meaningful contribution to the ecosystem.

–At 150M parameters, it's roughly half the size of the base F5-TTS config while retaining voice cloning and full Arabic diacritization (Tashkeel) support — a real engineering win for edge/low-resource deployments
–RTF of ~0.12 makes real-time streaming viable, putting it competitive with ElevenLabs and PlayHT on latency even on a single consumer GPU
–Apache 2.0 license removes the friction that hampered F5-TTS adoption in commercial products; developers can ship without legal review overhead
–Arabic NLP has lagged behind English by years; a high-quality open bilingual TTS directly unblocks voice assistants, accessibility tools, and content generation for 400M+ Arabic speakers
–Available via `pip install silma-tts` with a one-command demo app — unusually smooth DX for an academic-style model drop

// TAGS

silma-ttsspeechaudio-genopen-sourceopen-weights

DISCOVERED

27d ago

2026-03-15

PUBLISHED

27d ago

2026-03-15

RELEVANCE

7/ 10

AUTHOR

oudak2019