Open-sourced Hurston-1 TTS nails Southern American and African English accents
Gcarter08 · hn · 2026-10-25
Destined AI, an Atlanta-based startup, open-sourced Hurston-1 under Apache-2.0: a narrowband TTS model optimized for telephone use, especially strong on Southern American and regional African English accents.
Key facts:
- Built on voice data consented from 20,000+ people since 2021 (1M recordings, 1,800+ hrs); this model fine-tuned Maya1 on a 136-hour subset
- Already commercialized with customers including Amazon and Salesforce, generating over $500K in revenue
- Limitations: no consistent voice across prompts and no voice cloning, so not ideal for podcasts
- A next version with improvements is already in progress; model is downloadable on Hugging Face
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