LocalLLaMA was not impressed by another TTS clip so much as by a build log. The post that took off showed Qwen3-TTS running locally in real time, quantized through llama.cpp, with extra alignment work to make subtitles and lip sync behave.
A March 2026 r/LocalLLaMA post with 123 points and 25 comments spotlighted `voxtral-voice-clone`, a project trying to train the missing codec encoder for Mistral’s Voxtral-4B-TTS-2603. The repo targets zero-shot cloning via `ref_audio`, which the original open-weight release could not support because the encoder weights were not included.
Qwen3's TTS model encodes voices into 1024-dimensional vectors, enabling gender swapping, pitch adjustment, voice mixing, and semantic voice search through vector math — now available as a standalone lightweight encoder on HuggingFace.