How We Made a Text-to-Speech Model Respond in Sub-50 ms

time-to-first-audio (TTFA) is critical for realtime voice applications. open source implementations (e.g. vLLM-Omni, SGLang-Omni) are often too slow for production and can have issues with realtime playback if you push for lower latency. we wanted to fix that.

we optimized qwen3-tts, a popular OSS TTS model, to achieve 34 ms p95 TTFA at 10 requests per second on 1 x H100. we open source the implementation and benchmark, as well as a breakdown of how it was done.

github: https://github.com/nari-labs/nari-qwen3-tts