The open-text-to-speech (TTS) landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation between 2024 and mid-2026. What was once dominated by proprietary APIs from ElevenLabs, Google, and OpenAI now features a competitive ecosystem of open-weight models that rival commercial quality while offering substantially lower cost and greater deployment flexibility. This report provides a comprehensive comparison of the leading open realtime TTS models as of May 2026, with particular focus on three representative architectures: Kokoro-82M (the ultra-lightweight decoder-only model), Supertonic 3 (the ONNX-based flow-matching engine optimized for edge deployment), and Qwen3-TTS (the large-scale dual-track transformer family from Alibaba).
source & further reading
deepresearch.ninja — original article
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