### Egyptian Arabic that sounds Egyptian.
**82M parameters · 24 kHz · female voice · runs on a CPU**
A fine-tune of Nabra-82M, itself built on Kokoro-82M.
---
## Voice samples
**Food and family · 16 seconds**
**Morning routine · 17.5 seconds**
**A day in Cairo · 15.8 seconds**
All three are single-pass 24 kHz generations. Exact diacritized transcripts
and Cohere Transcribe Arabic checks are in
[`samples/voice-notes/metadata.json`](samples/voice-notes/metadata.json).
---
## The problem with Arabic TTS
Almost every Arabic voice you can buy or download speaks **Modern Standard
Arabic** — the language of news broadcasts and textbooks. Roughly no one speaks
it at home.
Point one of those models at Egyptian text and it does not fail loudly. It
fails *politely*: it reads your words with textbook consonants and textbook
vowels, and the result lands somewhere between a newsreader and a foreigner.
`جَمِيل` comes out **/ʤamiːl/** when a hundred million people say **/ɡamiːl/**.
`دِلْوَقْتِي` comes out **/dilwaqti/** when the street says **/dilwaʔti/**.
KemeTone is built for the dialect, not adapted to it.
| | Standard Arabic TTS | **KemeTone** |
|---|---|---|
| ج | /ʤ/ — *gemeel* | **/ɡ/ — *gameel*** |
| ق | /q/ — *dilwaqti* | **/ʔ/ — *dilwa'ti*** |
| ث | /θ/ — *thalatha* | **/t/ — *talata*** |
| ذ | /ð/ — *dhahab* | **/z/ — *zahab*** |
| ظ | /ðˤ/ | **/zˤ/** |
| Register | broadcast | **conversational** |
And it does this without becoming naive about it. Egyptians do not flatten
*every* ق to a glottal stop — `الْقُرْآن` keeps its /q/, `ثَقَافَة` keeps its
/s/, and a model that applies the rule everywhere sounds like a caricature.
KemeTone ships curated exception lexicons for exactly the learned and Qur'anic
vocabulary that resists the shift, so the rules fire where a Cairene speaker
fires them and stay quiet where they don't.
## Listen for
- **A natural female voice**, warm and conversational — not a formal announcer.
- **Long-form in a single pass.** 15–20 seconds of continuous speech with
coherent phrasing, no chunk-and-stitch seams.
- **Correct dialect consonants**, with the learned-vocabulary exceptions intact.
- **ع and ح that are actually pronounced** — the two pharyngeals that
general-purpose phonemisers silently drop.
## Quick start
```bash
pip install -r requirements.txt
```
You also need **espeak-ng** available to the phonemiser
(`apt install espeak-ng`, `brew install espeak-ng`, or set
`KEMETONE_ESPEAK_LIB` to a build of `libespeak-ng.so`).
```python
import torch, soundfile as sf
from kokoro import KModel
from kemetone import EgyptianG2P
model = KModel(repo_id="Rabe3/kemetone",
config="config.json", model="kemetone.pth").eval()
voice = torch.load("voices/kemetone.pt")
ipa = EgyptianG2P()("النَّهَارْدَه الْجَوّ حِلْو أَوِي")
audio = model(ipa, voice[len(ipa) - 1])
sf.write("out.wav", audio.numpy(), 24000)
```
Or straight from the command line:
```bash
python example.py "النَّهَارْدَه الْجَوّ حِلْو أَوِي" out.wav
```
### Give it diacritics
Arabic script does not write short vowels. When they are missing, the
phonemiser has to guess them — and it guesses the **Standard Arabic** way,
which is precisely the accent KemeTone exists to avoid. The consonants will
still be Egyptian; the vowels will not.
```
حلو → vowels guessed, MSA-flavoured
حِلْو → vowels read from the text ✓
```
Undiacritized input works and is often acceptable. Diacritized input is
noticeably better. If your text is bare, run it through an Arabic diacritizer
first — the quality gain is larger than anything else you can do at inference
time.
## Specifications
| | |
|---|---|
| Architecture | StyleTTS2 / Kokoro (ISTFTNet decoder) |
| Parameters | 81.8 M |
| Sample rate | 24 kHz mono |
| Voice | single female speaker |
| Language | Egyptian (Cairene) Arabic |
| Input | diacritized Arabic text |
| Weights | `kemetone.pth` (327 MB, fp32) |
| Voice embedding | `voices/kemetone.pt` |
| Hardware | CPU or any CUDA GPU; ~300 MB of VRAM |
| Licence | Apache 2.0 |
### What ships here
```
kemetone.pth model weights
config.json architecture + 178-symbol vocabulary
voices/kemetone.pt the voice embedding
kemetone/ Egyptian G2P front-end and its exception lexicons
example.py end-to-end synthesis
```
The front-end is part of the model, not a convenience wrapper. The weights were
trained on the phoneme strings this G2P produces; feeding them phonemes from a
generic Arabic phonemiser will degrade output in ways that are subtle enough to
miss and consistent enough to matter.
## Limitations
- **One voice.** No multi-speaker support, no voice cloning, no style prompts.
- **Cairene.** Not Sa'idi, not Alexandrian, and not any other Arabic dialect.
- **Diacritics carry the vowels.** See above.
- **Latin script, digits, and code-switched English** are not handled — convert
numbers to Arabic words before synthesis.
- **Very long inputs** must be split at sentence boundaries; the context window
is 510 tokens.
- Emotional range is conversational-neutral. There is no shouting, whispering,
or singing in this model.
## Responsible use
This voice is modelled on a real person. Please treat it accordingly:
- **Do not** use it to impersonate anyone, to put words in a real person's
mouth, or to produce audio that a listener could mistake for a genuine
recording of someone.
- **Do not** use it for fraud, harassment, political disinformation, or to
defeat voice-based authentication.
- **Do** disclose synthetic speech when the audience might otherwise assume it
is human — accessibility tools, narration, learning material, and assistants
are all better with a label on them.
Downstream users are responsible for complying with the laws on synthetic media
and personality rights in their own jurisdiction.
## Licence and credits
Released under **Apache 2.0**, inheriting the licence of the Kokoro
architecture it builds on.
Built on [Kokoro-82M](https://huggingface.co/hexgrad/Kokoro-82M) and
[Nabra-82M](https://huggingface.co/oddadmix/Nabra-82M-v0.1), with
phonemisation by [espeak-ng](https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng).
---
KemeTone — from Kemet, the old name for Egypt: the black land.
### Egyptian Arabic that sounds Egyptian.
**82M parameters · 24 kHz · female voice · runs on a CPU**
A fine-tune of Nabra-82M, itself built on Kokoro-82M.