# Hugging Face launches Open TTS Leaderboard for multilingual text-to-speech evaluation

Digest AI · Research · published 2026-09-30T00:00:00Z

Canonical: https://digestai.news/story/hugging-face-launches-open-tts-leaderboard-for-multilingual-text-to-sp

## Summary

Hugging Face introduced the Open TTS Leaderboard on September 30, 2026, to address gaps in text-to-speech (TTS) model evaluation. Existing arena-style leaderboards rely on human preference scores but struggle with scalability and open-source representation, listing only 16 of 92 models as open-weights. The new leaderboard uses objective metrics—word/character error rates (WER/CER), inference speed (RTFx, TTFA), and speaker similarity (SIM)—to rank models on intelligibility, performance, and voice cloning. It covers English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, with Pareto plots showing trade-offs between metrics.

The leaderboard prioritizes open-source models and multilingual support, offering a 'Listen' tab for direct audio comparisons and a 'Streaming' tab for latency benchmarks. Models like `hexgrad/Kokoro-82M` and `fishaudio/s2-pro` lead in English WER, while `k2-fsa/OmniVoice` excels in multilingual performance. Hugging Face plans to open-source evaluation scripts and invites community feedback to refine future iterations.

## Key points

- Open TTS Leaderboard uses objective metrics (WER, RTFx, SIM) instead of human preference for faster, scalable evaluation
- Only 16 of 92 TTS models on arena-style leaderboards are open-weights, per September 30 data
- Models like `hexgrad/Kokoro-82M` rank top in English WER, but multilingual performance varies by language

## Why it matters

The leaderboard accelerates TTS model development by providing standardized, objective benchmarks for open-source and multilingual models, addressing gaps in current evaluation methods.

## Sources

1. [Open TTS Leaderboard: Scalable Evaluation for Multilingual Text-to-Speech and Voice Cloning](https://huggingface.co/blog/open-tts-leaderboard) (Hugging Face, 2026-09-30, primary source)

## Cite

Digest AI, "Hugging Face launches Open TTS Leaderboard for multilingual text-to-speech evaluation", 30 September 2026, https://digestai.news/story/hugging-face-launches-open-tts-leaderboard-for-multilingual-text-to-sp

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