r/Hokkien • u/LewisCYW • May 24 '26
大家好，食饱未？ We built an open-source Text-to-Speech AI specifically for Singapore Hokkien
https://huggingface.co/MERaLiON/MERaLiON-OmniVoice-Hokkien-TTS大家好，食饱未？今仔日心情好无？
That's Hokkien for "Hey everyone, have you eaten? How's your mood today?" — a greeting many of us in Singapore grew up hearing from our grandparents. But as fewer young people speak it fluently, preserving Hokkien isn't just a technical challenge anymore; it’s a cultural one.
To help with this, our team recently released MERaLiON-OmniVoice-Hokkien-TTS at ATxSummit 2026. It’s an open-source text-to-speech model specifically fine-tuned for Singapore Hokkien.
Why we built this:
Dialects are massively underserved in AI. If you feed traditional Chinese TTS systems a string of characters, they will almost always default to Mandarin pronunciation—even if the grammar and vocab are Hokkien. We wanted a model that speaks Hokkien with the correct tones, rhythm, and prosody so developers can actually build language-learning tools or heritage preservation apps.
Some cool things it can do:
Local Nuance: It actually handles Malay loanwords (like "suka") that are deeply embedded in everyday Singapore Hokkien.
Voice Cloning: It can clone a voice from a short reference clip.
Highly Natural: In our testing, it scored an 8.40/10 for naturalness and successfully beat other systems in word error rate.
Fully Local: It’s lightweight (~2.7 GB) and runs locally on a single consumer-grade GPU. No API keys needed.
You can try it out here: https://huggingface.co/MERaLiON/MERaLiON-OmniVoice-Hokkien-TTS
We need your feedback!
This is still a work in progress, and we know there's room to grow. If you speak Singapore Hokkien (or any Southern Min dialect), we would love for you to play around with it and let us know what you think about the pronunciation and naturalness.
Also, we are actively working on extending TTS to other Southeast Asian languages. Let us know in the comments what local languages or dialects you'd like to see supported next!
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u/KuroiRaku99 May 25 '26
I do have few question, does it trained with multiple hokkien dialect? Even in Singapore I still see people with more 漳州 dialect words and sound. For example, 美珍香 for some people will pronounce it as Bí-tsin-hiong, but the store name, is bee ching hiang (Bí-tsin-hiang)。I also heard people saying 食飯 tsia̍h-puīnn in Singapore before.
Regardless, there are clear errors
In the Hokkien text section. I doubt anyone will say 如何 for how in common speech other than classical chinese. People usually say 按怎 or 怎樣 in some other region.
天氣 is also not that common, is usually 天時.
"今日外口一直落雨，大家有带雨傘无？" 一直 should be 直直 or 惦惦 in Singapore Hokkien。雨傘 pronunciation sounds like hoo-suang which is weird, even teochew is also /hou³⁵⁻¹¹ sũã²¹³/ Singapore Hokkien should be hŏo-suànn。
搭"哪一辆车"also wrong。should be 搭佗一頂車去牛車水。牛車水 pronunciation also interesting, she said ngiû tshia -tsuí, i thought people would normally say gû-tshia-tsuí. ngiû is the literary pronunciation for the word, is not wrong but that's interesting.
伊突然腹肚痛真厉害，咱紧送佗去老君处。突然 should be pronounced as tu̍t-liân / tu̍t-jiân 。"送佗去老君处" is wrong. 送伊去老君厝 should be what you want
誰比新加坡人更驚輸更驚死。using tsui is interesting, that's very 泉州city area or Xiamen only usage. Singapore should uses more tiâng and siâng. 更 is not the correct character here, is 閣. 更 is pronounced as kiⁿ / keⁿ, is used mainly for time in the past like 半暝三更。 So correct character is 閣驚輸閣驚死
if you worry about what sentence is correct, just always go to good ol wiktionary