# Qwen3-TTS vs SuperClonica for local text-to-speech

Updated 2026-10-23

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.

Both run on your own hardware. They differ in speed, languages and in how you get a voice.

## What Qwen3-TTS offers

The official examples run on an NVIDIA GPU in bfloat16, and FlashAttention 2 is recommended to reduce GPU memory use.

- 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.

## Qwen3-TTS speed on CPU

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.

## Quality, stability and languages

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.

## Which one to use

Both models are open and both run on your hardware, so the choice comes down to the job.

- 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.

## More on text to speech

- [Text-to-speech that runs on your own computer](https://superclonica.com/en/text-to-speech)
- [Supertonic vs SuperClonica: same model, faster and cleaner](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/supertonic)
- [Fish Audio and Fish Speech vs SuperClonica](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/fish-audio)
- [OmniVoice vs SuperClonica: more languages or more speed](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/omnivoice)
- [VoxCPM 2 vs SuperClonica: studio sound or CPU speed](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/voxcpm)
- [F5-TTS vs SuperClonica: zero-shot cloning or fast CPU speech](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/f5-tts)
- [An offline alternative to ElevenLabs](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/elevenlabs)
- [Kokoro TTS vs SuperClonica: two small models for local speech](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/kokoro)
- [Piper TTS vs SuperClonica: tiny devices or custom voices](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/piper)
- [Coqui XTTS-v2 vs SuperClonica: a Coqui TTS alternative](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/xtts)
- [Chatterbox TTS vs SuperClonica: instant cloning or a trained voice file](https://superclonica.com/en/compare/chatterbox)

## Text-to-speech guides

- [How to convert text to speech offline on your computer](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/offline-text-to-speech)
- [Voice cloning: how to get a voice that sounds like a recording](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/voice-cloning)
- [The best free text-to-speech models for local use in 2026](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/best-free-tts-models)
- [Text to speech for videos, audiobooks, games and apps](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/text-to-speech-for-videos)
- [Supertonic 3 voices: where to get custom voices and how to use them](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/supertonic-3-voices)
- [Text to speech in Python: offline, free and with natural voices](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/python-text-to-speech)
- [Self-hosted text-to-speech API in Docker](https://superclonica.com/en/guides/text-to-speech-api-docker)

## Frequently asked questions

### Can Qwen3-TTS run on CPU?

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.

### Is Qwen3-TTS free for commercial use?

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.

### Is there a faster alternative to Qwen3-TTS for offline speech?

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.

### Does Qwen3-TTS support Russian, Japanese or Korean?

Yes, all three are among its 10 languages. Supertonic 3 supports them as well.

- [Find a voice for Supertonic 3](https://superclonica.com/en/explore)
- [Get the SuperClonica engine](https://superclonica.com/en/superclonica)

## Sources

- [Qwen3-TTS repository (GitHub)](https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-TTS)
- [Qwen3-TTS 1.7B Base model card](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-Base)
- [Qwen3-TTS in C: performance notes](https://github.com/gabriele-mastrapasqua/qwen3-tts/blob/main/docs/performance.md)
- [Supertonic 3 model card](https://huggingface.co/supertone-oss-archive/supertonic-3)
- [SuperClonica](https://superclonica.com/en/)
- [AI voice catalog for text to speech](https://superclonica.com/en/explore)
- [Custom voice commissions for Supertonic 3](https://superclonica.com/en/requests)
- [How it works: voices, local speech, training](https://superclonica.com/en/guide)
- [Install the faster Supertonic 3 engine](https://superclonica.com/en/superclonica)
- [About us: speech synthesis enthusiasts](https://superclonica.com/en/about)
- [Contacts, support and voice complaints](https://superclonica.com/en/contacts)
- [Privacy policy: what data we keep](https://superclonica.com/en/privacy)
- [Terms of use: rules for buyers and authors](https://superclonica.com/en/terms)
- [Text to speech](https://superclonica.com/en/text-to-speech)