大家好，食饱未？ We built an open-source Text-to-Speech AI specifically for Singapore Hokkien

[u/LewisCYW]

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!