VoiceDesign is the instruct-tuned variant of Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B. Instead of cloning a reference WAV (Base) or picking from a fixed speaker table (CustomVoice), VoiceDesign generates speech in a voice described by a natural-language instruction — no reference audio, no preset speaker.

bash

crispasr ... \
    --instruct "A young female voice with a slight British accent, energetic, slightly fast paced" \
    --tts "Hello, I am an excited engineer."

This repo contains the talker / code-predictor model only. It must be used together with the separate tokenizer / codec GGUF from cstr/qwen3-tts-tokenizer-12hz-GGUF. The model has no speaker-encoder branch — the instruct text is embedded directly into the talker prefill.

VoiceDesign is 1.7B-only: there is no 0.6B-VoiceDesign weight release upstream.

Files

File	Size	Notes
`qwen3-tts-12hz-1.7b-voicedesign-f16.gguf`	3.6 GB	F16 reference baseline
`qwen3-tts-12hz-1.7b-voicedesign-q8_0.gguf`	1.9 GB	Q8_0, recommended quantised talker

Quick Start

Build CrispASR:

bash

git clone https://github.com/CrispStrobe/CrispASR
cd CrispASR
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j$(nproc) --target crispasr

Download the talker + tokenizer:

bash

huggingface-cli download cstr/qwen3-tts-1.7b-voicedesign-GGUF \
    qwen3-tts-12hz-1.7b-voicedesign-q8_0.gguf --local-dir .

huggingface-cli download cstr/qwen3-tts-tokenizer-12hz-GGUF \
    qwen3-tts-tokenizer-12hz.gguf --local-dir .

Synthesise with a natural-language voice description:

bash

./build/bin/crispasr \
    --backend qwen3-tts-1.7b-voicedesign \
    -m qwen3-tts-12hz-1.7b-voicedesign-q8_0.gguf \
    --codec-model qwen3-tts-tokenizer-12hz.gguf \
    --instruct "A young female voice with a slight British accent, energetic, slightly fast paced" \
    --tts "Hello, I am an excited engineer." \
    --tts-output hello.wav

Or let CrispASR pull both files for you on first run:

bash

./build/bin/crispasr \
    --backend qwen3-tts-1.7b-voicedesign -m auto \
    --instruct "warm, calm middle-aged male narrator" \
    --tts "The story begins on a quiet Tuesday morning." \
    --tts-output story.wav

Notes:

--instruct is required for VoiceDesign models. Passing --voice instead is a CLI error with a hint.
The instruct text is wrapped as <|im_start|>user\n{instruct}<|im_end|>\n and prepended to the talker prefill; the codec bridge omits the speaker frame entirely (the model has no fixed speaker embedding).

Quantisation Notes

qwen3-tts-12hz-1.7b-voicedesign-f16.gguf
- reference baseline (3.6 GB)
qwen3-tts-12hz-1.7b-voicedesign-q8_0.gguf
- recommended quantised deployment (1.9 GB)
- ASR-roundtrips word-exact on the English smoke prompt in current CrispASR testing ("Hello, I am an excited engineer." → parakeet-v3 → "Hello! I am an excited engineer!")

Lower-bit talker quants (q6_k, q5_k, q4_k) can still load but are not numerically faithful to the F16 reference and should be treated as experimental.

The companion tokenizer / codec should stay at F16.

How this was made

The upstream HF safetensors checkpoint was converted to GGUF F16 by models/convert-qwen3-tts-to-gguf.py. The converter sets qwen3tts.tts_model_type = "voice_design" from the upstream config.json, which the runtime keys off to switch into the VoiceDesign prefill path.
Quantised variants are produced with CrispASR's GGUF quantiser.
Inference is implemented in src/qwen3_tts.cpp; the VoiceDesign-specific prefill builder (build_voicedesign_prefill_embeds) mirrors Qwen3TTSForConditionalGeneration.generate for speaker_embed=None + instruct_ids (modeling_qwen3_tts.py L2076–L2233).

Reference implementation

Architecture and behaviour were checked against the official Qwen release:

upstream model card: Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-VoiceDesign
upstream repository: QwenLM/Qwen3-TTS

The CrispASR runtime is a clean C++ / ggml re-implementation for this repo's backend stack.

Base sibling (voice cloning from reference WAV): cstr/qwen3-tts-1.7b-base-GGUF
Smaller sibling (Base, 0.6B): cstr/qwen3-tts-0.6b-base-GGUF
Fixed-speaker sibling (CustomVoice, 0.6B): cstr/qwen3-tts-0.6b-customvoice-GGUF
Companion tokenizer / codec GGUF: cstr/qwen3-tts-tokenizer-12hz-GGUF
Upstream VoiceDesign model: Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-VoiceDesign
C++ runtime: CrispStrobe/CrispASR

License

Apache-2.0, inherited from the base model.

Provenance and EU AI Act Art. 53 note

Upstream model: Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-VoiceDesign — published by Qwen.
Upstream licence: apache-2.0. This repository redistributes under the same terms; it grants no rights the upstream licence does not.
What was done here: format conversion and/or quantisation only (GGUF/GGML). No training, no fine-tuning, no merging, no distillation, no change to architecture, vocabulary or capability. Only the numeric representation of the upstream weights differs.
Training data: documented — where it is documented at all — by the upstream provider; see the upstream model card. No training data was used, added or selected by this repository. No training-content summary was found on the upstream model card at the time of writing; that documentation gap is upstream's and is not filled here.
Provider status: under Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 the upstream authors remain the provider of this model. Converting the serialisation format does not make this repository the provider of a new general-purpose AI model, and no such claim is made. Questions about training content, copyright policy or model capability belong upstream.

cstr/qwen3-tts-1.7b-voicedesign-GGUF

Qwen3-TTS 12Hz 1.7B VoiceDesign — GGUF (CrispASR)

Files

Quick Start

Quantisation Notes

How this was made

Reference implementation

Related

License

Provenance and EU AI Act Art. 53 note

cstr/
qwen3-tts-1.7b-voicedesign-GGUF