Kitten-TTS 2: New Open-source SOTA 1.58 bit TTS (CPU-only with voice cloning, multilingual, emotion control)
KittenML has just released code and weights of Kitten-TTS 2, which is a super-efficient frontier TTS model, and the world's first 1.58-bit TTS model.
Proof1 community thread
Key points
- It runs in real time on just a CPU, with zero-shot voice cloning, multilingual support, and expressive / emphasis control.
- Ternary TTS: Every linear weight in the body is one of three values (-1, 0, +1) with group size of 128 for scales.
- Multilingual TTS: Model supports voice cloning in 20+ languages.
- Completely new architecture, natural sounding speech, ternary weights, zero-shot voice cloning, multilingual, and emphasis/emotion control.
Sources (1)
- [1]Kitten-TTS 2: New Open-source SOTA 1.58 bit TTS (CPU-only with voice cloning, multilingual, emotion control)r/LocalLLaMA (top, daily) · Oct 22, 12:33 AM
KittenML has just released code and weights of Kitten-TTS 2, which is a super-efficient frontier TTS model, and the world's first 1.58-bit TTS model.
It runs in real time on just a CPU, with zero-shot voice cloning, multilingual support, and expressive / emphasis control.
Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.
Hype check
Independently evaluated2 independent looks since
- Evaluation · Oct 22, 2026Ensemble forecasting with IBM Granite time-series models
- Evaluation · Oct 22, 2026How to Test AI Agents When No Benchmark Exists — Nathanael Weill, Air Canada
- Follow-up · Oct 22, 20262-bit copy in VRAM + exact residual in system RAM as the verifier: speculative decoding for models that don't fit your GPU
- Follow-up · Oct 22, 2026ollama/ollama v0.40.9-rc1: v0.40.9
- Follow-up · Oct 22, 2026Moss Image Lora: Ultimate Digital Artwork
- Follow-up · Oct 22, 2026Open source LLM appreciation post
Before this
- Oct 21, 2026Mica v0.5: The smartest 4B decision model is also the fastest one. 20 ms per answer, 25x faster than Jev
- Oct 20, 2026Voxtral 3
- Oct 20, 2026[AINews] DeepSeek DeepInfer: Open Source SOTA Inference running 155T toks/day/cluster making $22m/day at ~80% margin for a 81 day payback
- Oct 19, 2026We built our own inference engine so a 32B model could keep 262K context inside a 16 GB GPU budget. Here's an uncut run.
- Oct 19, 2026NVIDIA Cosmos3-H-Dreams: Bringing Clinical Surgery to Life Through Generative Simulation
- Oct 19, 2026TorchNeuron: running HF models on AWS Trainium is easier than ever
