MOSS-TTS-Nano

MOSS-TTS-Nano is a multilingual text-to-speech model with only 100 million parameters that runs in real time on a CPU. No GPU required. It now handles 20 languages, including English, Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Korean, with solid quality for its size. Small enough to embed in desktop apps, local demos, or lightweight web services. Apache 2.0.

Runs via Python with standard ML dependencies, and there is now an ONNX CPU build that nearly doubles throughput. Models are on HuggingFace and ModelScope, finetuning code is published for custom voices, and recent additions include mlx-audio support for Apple Silicon and a browser reader extension. The deployment stack stays simple: no CUDA, no heavy inference server, a basic machine handles it.

Free for everyone under a permissive license. Solo developers building voice features get real-time TTS without paying per-character API fees. Teams shipping products can embed it directly without usage limits.

The catch: 100M parameters means tradeoffs in naturalness and expressiveness. If you need the best possible voice quality, larger models or paid APIs like ElevenLabs will sound better. This is the right call when you want speed, low cost, and local execution over peak fidelity.