Model reference · open weights
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 by | UBC-NLP |
|---|---|
| Type | Audio & music |
| Task | Speech→text |
| Parameters (lead) | 36M |
| Runs with | transformers |
| Released | 2025-05-08 |
| Popularity | 540 downloads / month |
| Licence | Open weights |
About
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.
Introduced in our EMNLP 2025 paper Voice of a Continent, the Simba Series represents the current state-of-the-art for African speech AI.
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.
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 Model | Architecture | Hugging Face Card | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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
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.