Model reference · open weights

Simba-TTS-lin

Available as managed deployment Audio UBC-NLP Speech→text 1 variants 540 dl/mo

Simba-TTS-lin is an open-weight audio or speech model from UBC-NLP. AxForge deploys and operates it for you on dedicated EU-owned hardware — with the licence handled where one is required.

Available as managed deployment — configured and operated for you on dedicated EU hardware, quoted per deployment.

What it is

Released byUBC-NLP
TypeAudio & music
TaskSpeech→text
Parameters (lead)36M
Runs withtransformers
Released2025-05-08
Popularity540 downloads / month
LicenceOpen weights

About

What Simba-TTS-lin is

Bridging the Digital Divide for African AI

Voice of a Continent is a comprehensive open-source ecosystem designed to bring African languages to the forefront of artificial intelligence. By providing a unified suite of benchmarking tools and state-of-the-art models, we ensure that the future of speech technology is inclusive, representative, and accessible to over a billion people.

Best-in-Class Multilingual Models

Introduced in our EMNLP 2025 paper Voice of a Continent, the Simba Series represents the current state-of-the-art for African speech AI.

Read the full model card
  • Unified Suite: Models optimized for African languages.
  • Superior Accuracy: Outperforms generic multilingual models by leveraging SimbaBench's high-quality, domain-diverse datasets.
  • Multitask Capability: Designed for high performance in ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) and TTS (Text-to-Speech).
  • Inclusion-First: Specifically built to mitigate the "digital divide" by empowering speakers of underrepresented languages.

The Simba family consists of state-of-the-art models fine-tuned using SimbaBench. These models achieve superior performance by leveraging dataset quality, domain diversity, and language family relationships.

🔊 Simba-TTS (Text-to-Speech)

  • 🎯 Task: Text-to-Speech — Natural Voice Synthesis. 🌍 Language Coverage (7 African languages)

Afrikaans (afr), Asante Twi (asanti), Akuapem Twi (akuapem), Lingala (lin), Southern Sotho (sot), Tswana (tsn), Xhosa (xho)

TTS ModelArchitectureHugging Face CardStatus
Simba-TTS-afr 🔊MMS-TTS🤗 https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-TTS-afr✅ Released
Simba-TTS-twi-asanti 🔊MMS-TTS🤗 https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-TTS-twi-asanti✅ Released
Simba-TTS-twi-akuapem 🔊MMS-TTS🤗 https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-TTS-twi-akuapem✅ Released
Simba-TTS-lin 🔊MMS-TTS🤗 https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-TTS-lin✅ Released
Simba-TTS-sot 🔊MMS-TTS🤗 https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-TTS-sot✅ Released
Simba-TTS-tsn 🔊MMS-TTS🤗 https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-TTS-tsn✅ Released
Simba-TTS-xho 🔊MMS-TTS🤗 https://huggingface.co/UBC-NLP/Simba-TTS-xho✅ Released

🧩 Usage Example

You can easily run inference using the Hugging Face transformers library.

from transformers import VitsModel, AutoTokenizer
import torch

model_name="Simba-TTS-afr" ## Simba-TTS-twi-asanti, Simba-TTS-twi-akuapem, Simba-TTS-lin, Simba-TTS-sot, Simba-TTS-tsn, Simba-TTS-xho
model = VitsModel.from_pretrained(model_name)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)

text = "Ons noem hierdie deeltjies sub-atomiese deeltjies" #example of Afrikaans (afr) language
inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt")

with torch.no_grad():
    output = model(**inputs).waveform

The resulting waveform can be saved as a .wav file:

scipy.io.wavfile.write("outputfile.wav", rate=model.config.sampling_rate, data=output.float().numpy())

From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

Once AxForge deploys simba-tts-lin for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (simba-tts-lin below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)

$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/audio/transcriptions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \
  -F model="simba-tts-lin" -F file=@audio.mp3

Create an account — your API key is available in the console. 3M free tokens every 30 days with every new account.

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