narrator-tts

ScrappyLabs Narrator TTS

A fine-tuned Qwen3-TTS 1.7B CustomVoice model producing a warm, expressive narrator voice optimized for storytelling, audiobooks, and conversational AI.

What Is This?

This is one of the first public fine-tunes of Qwen3-TTS. We took the 1.7B CustomVoice base model and trained it on 461 curated narrator-style audio samples to produce a consistent, high-quality storytelling voice without needing a reference audio clip at inference time.

Unlike voice cloning (which requires a reference WAV each time), this finetune bakes the voice identity into the model weights — just pass text in and get narrator audio out.

Audio Samples

Storytelling

"Once upon a time, in a forest older than memory, there lived a bear who collected stories the way other bears collected honey."

<audio controls src="https://huggingface.co/scrappylabs/narrator-tts/resolve/main/samples/storytelling.mp3"></audio>

Suspense

"The door creaked open. Inside, the room was empty, except for a single envelope on the table, addressed to no one."

<audio controls src="https://huggingface.co/scrappylabs/narrator-tts/resolve/main/samples/suspense.mp3"></audio>

Educational

"The octopus has three hearts, blue blood, and the ability to change both the color and texture of its skin in less than a second."

<audio controls src="https://huggingface.co/scrappylabs/narrator-tts/resolve/main/samples/educational.mp3"></audio>

Conversational

"Hey, you know what? Today was a good day. Not perfect, but good. And sometimes that's more than enough."

<audio controls src="https://huggingface.co/scrappylabs/narrator-tts/resolve/main/samples/conversational.mp3"></audio>

Key Features

• No reference audio needed — the narrator voice is embedded in the weights
• Instruct/emotion support — accepts style instructions (e.g., "warm and gentle", "excited", "mysterious whisper")
• Multilingual capable — inherits Qwen3-TTS base multilingual support (en, zh, ja, ko, de, fr, ru, pt, es, it)
• Drop-in compatible — works with any Qwen3-TTS serving stack
• Apache 2.0 — fully open, commercial use OK

Training Details

The training data consists of narrator-style speech samples covering a range of emotional expressions, pacing, and content types — from calm storytelling to dramatic narration.

Model Size

Usage

With Qwen3-TTS Server

If you're running a Qwen3-TTS server (like qwen3-tts-server), register this as a finetuned speaker and request it by name:

import requests

response = requests.post("http://localhost:8109/v1/audio/speech", json={
    "input": "Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there lived a brave little bear.",
    "voice": "narrator"
})

with open("output.wav", "wb") as f:
    f.write(response.content)

With Instruct (Emotion Control)

response = requests.post("http://localhost:8109/v1/audio/speech", json={
    "input": "And then, from the shadows... something moved.",
    "voice": "narrator",
    "instruct": "mysterious and suspenseful, slow pace"
})

Direct with Transformers

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    "scrappylabs/narrator-tts",
    torch_dtype="auto",
    device_map="auto"
)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("scrappylabs/narrator-tts")

See the Qwen3-TTS documentation for full inference code.

Why Finetune vs. Voice Clone?

For production use cases where you need a consistent character voice across thousands of generations, finetuning wins.

Use Cases

• Audiobook narration
• Children's story apps
• Podcast intros/outros
• AI assistant voice
• Game narration
• Any application needing a warm, consistent narrator

About ScrappyLabs

ScrappyLabs builds open-source voice AI tools. This model powers our production TTS pipeline, serving narrator voice across our apps including Poo Bear (an AI-powered teddy bear for kids).

License

Apache 2.0 — same as the base Qwen3-TTS model. Use it for anything.

Citation

If you use this model, a mention of ScrappyLabs is appreciated but not required.

@misc{scrappylabs-narrator-tts-2026,
  author = {ScrappyLabs},
  title = {ScrappyLabs Narrator TTS: A Qwen3-TTS 1.7B Voice Finetune},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/scrappylabs/narrator-tts}
}