{"kind":"compare","slug":"qwen3-tts","path":"/compare/qwen3-tts","title":"Qwen3-TTS Alternative: Faster TTS on CPU | SuperClonica","description":"Qwen3-TTS vs SuperClonica: 3-second voice cloning, voice design and Chinese against a Supertonic 3 engine that is lighter and faster on CPU. Which one to pick.","h1":"Qwen3-TTS vs SuperClonica for local text-to-speech","intro":"Qwen3-TTS is the Qwen team's open speech model family, released in January 2026 in 0.6B and 1.7B sizes under Apache 2.0. It clones a voice from three seconds of audio, designs voices from a text description and streams audio with low latency. SuperClonica is narrower: ready-made and trained Supertonic 3 voices that run fast on a CPU.\n\nBoth run on your own hardware. They differ in speed, languages and in how you get a voice.","sections":[{"heading":"What Qwen3-TTS offers","paragraphs":["The official examples run on an NVIDIA GPU in bfloat16, and FlashAttention 2 is recommended to reduce GPU memory use."],"points":["10 languages: Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, plus dialect voice profiles.","3-second voice cloning with the Base models, without a training step.","Voice design from a natural-language description (the 1.7B VoiceDesign model).","Instructions that control tone, speaking rate and emotion.","Streaming generation; the authors report end-to-end latency as low as 97 ms."]},{"heading":"Qwen3-TTS speed on CPU","paragraphs":["Our estimate for the 0.6B model on a desktop 8-core CPU is 1–2× slower than real time: 10 seconds of speech in 10–20 seconds. It rests on a community engine written in C that reports a real-time factor of 2.02 for the 0.6B model with INT4 weights on a Ryzen 7 6800H laptop. The 1.7B model is slower; we put it at 2–5× slower than real time. Plain PyTorch can be considerably slower than that C engine.","On Apple Silicon the numbers favor Qwen more: the same C engine reports 0.52 on an M1, about twice as fast as real time.","SuperClonica on a desktop 8-core CPU runs 6.4–9.7× faster than real time by our estimate, so the same 10 seconds take about 1.0–1.6 seconds."]},{"heading":"Quality, stability and languages","paragraphs":["In our ratings Qwen3-TTS gets 4 out of 5 for quality and 4 for timbre stability; SuperClonica gets 4.5 and 5.","The language count favors Supertonic 3, 31 against 10, but the overlap is uneven. Qwen3-TTS speaks Chinese and Supertonic 3 doesn't. Supertonic 3 adds Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Polish and most other European languages."]},{"heading":"Which one to use","paragraphs":["Both models are open and both run on your hardware, so the choice comes down to the job."],"points":["Qwen3-TTS: you need Chinese, instant cloning or voice design, or you are building a voice assistant on a GPU and care about first-packet latency.","SuperClonica: you generate a lot of speech on CPUs, work in one of the 31 Supertonic 3 languages, or want one trained voice to keep the same timbre across thousands of lines."]}],"faq":[{"question":"Can Qwen3-TTS run on CPU?","answer":"Yes, through community engines. A pure C implementation reports a real-time factor of 2.02 for the 0.6B model with INT4 weights on a Ryzen 7 6800H and 0.52 on an Apple M1. We estimate 1–2× slower than real time on a desktop 8-core CPU."},{"question":"Is Qwen3-TTS free for commercial use?","answer":"The repository and the model weights on Hugging Face are published under Apache 2.0, which permits commercial use. Read the license file before launch all the same."},{"question":"Is there a faster alternative to Qwen3-TTS for offline speech?","answer":"For the 31 languages that Supertonic 3 supports, yes: by our estimate the SuperClonica engine runs Supertonic 3 voices 6.4–9.7× faster than real time on a desktop CPU. You give up instant cloning: a new voice is trained or bought as a file."},{"question":"Does Qwen3-TTS support Russian, Japanese or Korean?","answer":"Yes, all three are among its 10 languages. Supertonic 3 supports them as well."}],"cta":{"catalog":"Find a voice for Supertonic 3","install":"Get the SuperClonica engine"},"sources":[{"label":"Qwen3-TTS repository (GitHub)","url":"https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-TTS"},{"label":"Qwen3-TTS 1.7B Base model card","url":"https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-Base"},{"label":"Qwen3-TTS in C: performance notes","url":"https://github.com/gabriele-mastrapasqua/qwen3-tts/blob/main/docs/performance.md"},{"label":"Supertonic 3 model card","url":"https://huggingface.co/supertone-oss-archive/supertonic-3"}],"published":"2026-10-17","updated":"2026-10-23","pages":[{"slug":"text-to-speech","path":"/text-to-speech","h1":"Text-to-speech that runs on your own computer"},{"slug":"supertonic","path":"/compare/supertonic","h1":"Supertonic vs SuperClonica: same model, faster and cleaner"},{"slug":"fish-audio","path":"/compare/fish-audio","h1":"Fish Audio and Fish Speech vs SuperClonica"},{"slug":"omnivoice","path":"/compare/omnivoice","h1":"OmniVoice vs SuperClonica: more languages or more speed"},{"slug":"qwen3-tts","path":"/compare/qwen3-tts","h1":"Qwen3-TTS vs SuperClonica for local text-to-speech"},{"slug":"voxcpm","path":"/compare/voxcpm","h1":"VoxCPM 2 vs SuperClonica: studio sound or CPU speed"},{"slug":"f5-tts","path":"/compare/f5-tts","h1":"F5-TTS vs SuperClonica: zero-shot cloning or fast CPU speech"},{"slug":"elevenlabs","path":"/compare/elevenlabs","h1":"An offline alternative to ElevenLabs"},{"slug":"kokoro","path":"/compare/kokoro","h1":"Kokoro TTS vs SuperClonica: two small models for local speech"},{"slug":"piper","path":"/compare/piper","h1":"Piper TTS vs SuperClonica: tiny devices or custom voices"},{"slug":"xtts","path":"/compare/xtts","h1":"Coqui XTTS-v2 vs SuperClonica: a Coqui TTS alternative"},{"slug":"chatterbox","path":"/compare/chatterbox","h1":"Chatterbox TTS vs SuperClonica: instant cloning or a trained voice file"}],"related":[{"slug":"offline-text-to-speech","path":"/guides/offline-text-to-speech","h1":"How to convert text to speech offline on your computer"},{"slug":"voice-cloning","path":"/guides/voice-cloning","h1":"Voice cloning: how to get a voice that sounds like a recording"},{"slug":"best-free-tts-models","path":"/guides/best-free-tts-models","h1":"The best free text-to-speech models for local use in 2026"},{"slug":"text-to-speech-for-videos","path":"/guides/text-to-speech-for-videos","h1":"Text to speech for videos, audiobooks, games and apps"},{"slug":"supertonic-3-voices","path":"/guides/supertonic-3-voices","h1":"Supertonic 3 voices: where to get custom voices and how to use them"},{"slug":"python-text-to-speech","path":"/guides/python-text-to-speech","h1":"Text to speech in Python: offline, free and with natural voices"},{"slug":"text-to-speech-api-docker","path":"/guides/text-to-speech-api-docker","h1":"Self-hosted text-to-speech API in Docker"}]}