Dia – An open-source text-to-speech model that supports the generation of natural and lifelike conversational speech

What is Dia?

Dia is an open-source text-to-speech (TTS) model developed by Nari Labs. With 1.6 billion parameters, Dia can generate highly realistic conversational speech directly from text scripts. It supports multi-speaker tagging, emotional tone control, and non-verbal cues such as laughter or coughing. Through its voice cloning feature, Dia can produce speech that closely resembles a reference audio. The code and model weights are open-sourced on Hugging Face and GitHub, enabling users to download and deploy locally or test it online via a Gradio demo.

Key Features of Dia

• Natural Dialogue Generation: Generates highly realistic speech from text scripts, with support for multi-speaker tags (e.g., [S1], [S2]), ideal for multi-person conversations.

• Emotion and Tone Control: Allows users to adjust emotional tone and speaking style using audio prompts or fixed seeds, making the speech more expressive.

• Non-verbal Cues: Supports non-verbal audio cues like laughter, coughing, or throat clearing, adding realism and naturalness to dialogue.

• Zero-Shot Voice Cloning: Dia supports zero-shot voice cloning. Users can upload a short reference audio clip, and the model will replicate its voice style—no fine-tuning required for each new speaker.

• Real-Time Voice Synthesis: Optimized for real-time inference even on consumer-grade devices. On enterprise-grade GPUs, Dia can generate audio at real-time speeds.

Technical Foundations of Dia

• Transformer-Based Architecture: Dia is built on a Transformer architecture, a powerful deep learning model widely used in NLP and speech synthesis. It handles long text sequences effectively and produces high-quality audio outputs.

• One-Pass Dialogue Generation: Unlike traditional TTS models that stitch together segments, Dia can generate full conversations from a script in one pass, resulting in smoother and more natural dialogue.

Project Links

• GitHub Repository: https://github.com/nari-labs/dia

• Hugging Face Model Hub: https://huggingface.co/nari-labs/Dia-1.6B

• Online Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/nari-labs/Dia-1.6B

Application Scenarios for Dia

• Video Production: Generate natural, flowing dialogue for videos, including narration and character conversations, to enhance content appeal.

• Audio Content Creation: Create podcasts, audiobooks, and more, with expressive emotional tones and varied speaking styles.

• Language Learning: Help learners improve speaking and listening skills through natural, expressive dialogue generation.

• Customer Service & Virtual Assistants: Generate smooth, realistic voice interactions for customer support systems or virtual assistants, enhancing user experience.

• Advertising & Promotion: Produce voice content for ads and promotional materials with emotional tone control to boost effectiveness.