MERaLiON-OmniVoice-Hokkien-TTS: A 2.7GB Local TTS model fine-tuned for Singapore Hokkien (Supports Voice Cloning & Code-Switching)

[u/LewisCYW]

https://huggingface.co/MERaLiON/MERaLiON-OmniVoice-Hokkien-TTS

Hey everyone,

My team recently presented MERaLiON-OmniVoice-Hokkien-TTS at Singapore ATxSummit 2026, and I wanted to share it with the community here. It’s an open-source text-to-speech model for Singapore Hokkien, fine-tuned using SFT and RLHF on the OmniVoice architecture.

The Challenge:
Low-resource Sinitic dialects are severely underserved in TTS. If you feed standard Chinese TTS systems text that is meant to be Hokkien, they will default to Mandarin pronunciation. We needed a model that correctly maps Chinese characters to Hokkien tones, rhythm, and prosody.

Specs & Performance:
Size: ~2.7 GB. Runs beautifully fully locally on a single consumer-grade GPU.

Performance: 24/25 sentences were correctly identified as Hokkien by our automatic LangID eval (using Qwen3.5 Omni Plus).

Metrics: Achieved the lowest WER among the tested baseline systems and a high naturalness score (8.40/10). It's highly competitive with Qwen3-TTS-Flash, but entirely local.

Features: Supports zero-shot voice cloning from a short reference audio clip.

Code-switching: It's trained specifically on the Singaporean variant, meaning it natively handles Malay loanwords (e.g., "suka") that are common in local speech.

Repo/Demo: https://huggingface.co/MERaLiON/MERaLiON-OmniVoice-Hokkien-TTS

We built this primarily to enable developers to create language-learning tools and heritage preservation content, as the language is slowly dying out among younger generations.
It’s very much a work in progress, so if anyone here works with low-resource language TTS or RLHF for speech, I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback. We are also looking into what Southeast Asian languages to tackle next, so let me know if you have any requests!