Show HN: Hurston-1 open source TTS that speak Southern American and Afro-English

Category: ai-ml

Tags: text-to-speech, accent-generation, telephony, voice-ai, low-resource-languages

Score: 7.0/10 (Innovation: 7, Technical: 7, Documentation: 8, Utility: 7)

Hurston-1 is a fine-tuned TTS model (based on Maya1) that specializes in Southern American and various African English accents, with a unique narrowband mode for telephone-quality audio. It includes voice description prompts and telephony-ready encoding, making it practical for call-center simulations and accent-fairness testing.

Target audience: AI/ML engineers, speech researchers, call-center developers, accessibility tool builders

Repository: https://huggingface.co/destined/hurston-1

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