silma-tts-derja

silma-tts-derja — Tunisian Derja speech synthesis

An F5-TTS fine-tune that speaks Tunisian Derja, the dialect Tunisians actually use in conversation.

Why this exists

Every off-the-shelf Arabic TTS produces Modern Standard Arabic — a formal register nobody speaks conversationally. A system that answers a nervous Tunisian user in MSA sounds like a news broadcast, which is close to the opposite of the intended effect.

No usable Derja voice existed, so this one was fine-tuned. It also handles the Derja/French code-switching that is normal in Tunisian speech, rather than suppressing it.

Intended use

Conversational applications aimed at Tunisian users: voice assistants, coaching and support systems, accessibility tools, educational software.

Built for and deployed in Solace, a real-time multimodal AI coaching system, where it runs locally and in-process so that user audio never leaves the machine.

Usage

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Limitations

• The shipped reference clip is an English sample. F5-TTS conditions output prosody on a reference recording, so Derja prosody would improve measurably with a native Derja reference clip. This is the largest known weakness.
• Trained on a limited Derja corpus. Coverage of rare vocabulary and of regional variation within Tunisia is uneven.
• No formal MOS evaluation has been run; quality claims here are qualitative.
• Synthesis is CPU-bound in the deployment it was built for; a GPU roughly halves latency.

Training

Fine-tuned from SWivid/F5-TTS on Tunisian Derja speech.

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Related work

Citation

@misc{ghazouani2025silmattsderja,
  author = {Ghazouani, Wala Eddine},
  title  = {silma-tts-derja: Tunisian Derja speech synthesis},
  year   = {2025},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/Ghazouaniwala/silma-tts-derja}
}

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Built by Wala Eddine Ghazouani · GitHub · LinkedIn