Overview
Higgs Audio is an open text-to-speech (TTS) model from Boson AI. The latest release, v3, generates conversational speech across more than 100 languages and supports zero-shot voice cloning, so you can match a target voice from a short sample. It also accepts inline controls for emotion, style, and prosody.
It is aimed at developers building voice features who want either a hosted endpoint or full control over the model. You can call the OpenAI-compatible Boson AI API without any GPU, or download the open weights and run them yourself. Both paths cover preset voices, voice cloning, and streaming.
Within the speech and audio space, Higgs Audio sits alongside other neural TTS systems but leans toward expressive, multi-language output. Note that v3 is a standalone release: you grab the weights or call the API directly rather than cloning this repository.
What it does
- Conversational text-to-speech across more than 100 languages
- Zero-shot voice cloning from a short reference sample
- Inline control over emotion, style, and prosody
- OpenAI-compatible API endpoint, with no GPU setup required
- Open weights you can self-host, with streaming support
- Recommended serving via SGLang-Omni for self-hosted deployments
Getting started
The quickest path is the hosted Boson AI API, which needs no GPU. You can also download the open weights and serve them yourself.
Call the hosted API
Get a free, rate-limited key at boson.ai/workspace, set it as an environment variable, then post text to the speech endpoint to receive an MP3.
export BOSON_API_KEY=bai-xxxx
curl https://api.boson.ai/v1/audio/speech \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $BOSON_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model": "higgs-audio-v3-tts", "input": "Hello, this is a test."}' \
--output out.mp3Or self-host the open weights
Download the v3 weights from Hugging Face and serve them with SGLang-Omni. Serving, voice-cloning, and streaming recipes are in the model card and the SGLang-Omni cookbook.
export HF_TOKEN=hf_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
hf download bosonai/higgs-audio-v3-tts-4b
sgl-omni serve --model-path bosonai/higgs-audio-v3-tts-4b --port 8000Commands and code are distilled from the project's own documentation — always check the official repo for the latest.
When to use it
- Adding multilingual spoken output to an app or assistant via a hosted API
- Cloning a specific voice from a short sample for narration or characters
- Self-hosting an open TTS model to keep audio generation in your own infrastructure
- Producing expressive speech with controlled emotion, style, and prosody
How Higgs Audio compares
Higgs Audio alongside other open-source audio, music & voice tools AI/TLDR tracks, ranked by GitHub stars.
| Tool | Stars | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Whisper | ★ 109k | OpenAI's speech recognition model that transcribes and translates audio across many languages. |
| GPT-SoVITS | ★ 62k | An open-source WebUI that clones a voice from a short audio sample and turns text into speech, with zero-shot and few-shot fine-tuning. |
| Voicebox | ★ 55.4k | Local-first voice studio that clones a voice from a short sample, generates speech across seven TTS engines and 23 languages, handles system-wide dictation, and speaks for agents over MCP. |
| VibeVoice | ★ 54.5k | Microsoft's text-to-speech model for generating long, expressive multi-speaker audio like podcasts. |
| whisper.cpp | ★ 53.8k | A dependency-free C/C++ port of Whisper built on ggml, running speech recognition on CPU, Metal, CUDA, Vulkan and NPUs from phones to servers. |
| Coqui TTS | ★ 46k | A library of text-to-speech models including the multilingual XTTS voice-cloning model. |
| ChatTTS | ★ 39.9k | ChatTTS is an open-source text-to-speech model tuned for dialogue, with multi-speaker support and fine-grained control over laughter, pauses, and prosody. |
| Higgs Audio | ★ 8.4k | Open text-to-speech and voice cloning across 100+ languages from Boson AI |