Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English
Hey HN, I’m open sourcing my Hurston-1 narrowband TTS model (Apache-2.0). It is very good with American English and does especially well with Southern American and Regional African English accents. Destined AI is based in Atlanta, and I built this because I’m amazed by what AI can do, and I wanted to help introduce and welcome more people to feel comfortable using and interacting with AI. Since 2021, I’ve been collecting fully consented voice data from over 20,000 people, 1M audio recordings, and over 1,800 hrs of audio captured to date. For this model, I used a small part of the data, 136 hrs, to finetune Maya1 and expand it’s capabilities. Hurston-1 is a narrowband TTS model that focuses the output on telephone use because that is still where most of these voices will be heard. I’ve used it to support customers such as Amazon and Salesforce and generated over half-mill revenue with it. Now I’m open sourcing it to help unlock opportunities for others as well. Limitations: this model doesn’t maintain the exact same voice across prompts and doesn’t support voice cloning. For many use cases, this is fine but maybe not so - if you’re creating podcasts. This is the first release - I’m already working on the next version with improvements. I would appreciate, if anyone is interested in this space, download the model from huggingface, check it out and let me know any feedback. Also, open to connecting with others in this space as well.
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Sounds like your project is for southern American English presumably including African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), and for regional accents in the African continent specifically for the English language. But tangentially related, for non-English languages of the African continent, the Gates Foundation are pledging some grants to improve AI access outside of English-speaking regions: https://news.bpdata.com/article/gates-foundation-pledges-1-b... Despite being focused on English, your project could be of interest for their funding. It's probably worth reaching out to let them know about your work.
Do you have a way to demo the voice without downloading and running the model? The Huggingface playback doesn't work.
Seeing Atlanna inspire an open weight model was not on my 2026 bingo card.
Tangentially-related: When YouTube auto-dubs now, I noticed that Spanish language get dubbed in a Spanish-inflected accent, and French language similarly (I think). Is it likely that they are using a model like this? Or are they actually trying to voice clone the original and then translate to English? I'm not even sure if the few Spanish-accented English auto-dubs I've heard are the same voice or not. (Actually, that reminds me of growing up in Italy, where for a long time all English movies were shown dubbed, not subtitled, and they had the same lead male voice for all male leads, and the same lead female voice for all female leads, across every movie. I can still hear those voices in my head now thirty years later...)
AAVE was an awful term, but "Regional African English" and "Afro-English" is even worse if you're trying to talk about black Americans. Are you talking about the English of Africans in different parts of Africa? If so, are you including the voices of white and Mediterranean Africans? I'm confused. As a black American with roots (going back a couple centuries) in the Ark-La-Tex, I would think our dialects would be covered under "Southern American," which makes me suspect that you were referring to me with all of those references to another continent.