Qwen3-TTS: Open-Source Text-to-Speech and ComfyUI Integration

Qwen3-TTS is a next-generation, open-source text-to-speech (TTS) system developed by the Qwen team at Alibaba Cloud. It focuses on producing natural, expressive, and human-like speech while remaining flexible enough for developers, creators, and researchers.

This article gives a clear overview of what Qwen3-TTS is, what makes it special, and how it can be used inside ComfyUI through community-developed custom nodes.

What Is Qwen3-TTS?

Qwen3-TTS is a family of open-source TTS models designed to convert text into high-quality speech. Unlike traditional TTS systems that sound robotic or flat, Qwen3-TTS emphasizes natural pacing, realistic intonation, and expressive delivery.

The project is released under the Apache-2.0 license, which means it can be used freely for research, personal projects, and even commercial applications.

Official repository: https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-TTS

Key Features

Natural and Expressive Speech

Qwen3-TTS generates speech that closely resembles human voice patterns. It handles pauses, emphasis, and rhythm in a way that feels natural, making it suitable for narration, dialogue, and conversational agents.

Multilingual Support

The model supports multiple languages, including English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, and French. This makes it useful for global applications and multilingual content creation.

Voice Cloning

One of the standout features is voice cloning. By providing a short reference audio sample, Qwen3-TTS can replicate the speaker’s vocal characteristics. This is often referred to as zero-shot voice cloning.

Voice Design with Natural Language

Instead of relying only on recorded samples, Qwen3-TTS can generate voices based on text descriptions. For example, users can describe a voice as calm, energetic, young, or mature, and the model will synthesize a matching voice style.

Low Latency and Real-Time Output

Thanks to its efficient architecture, Qwen3-TTS supports streaming audio output. This allows speech to begin almost immediately after text input, which is especially useful for interactive applications like chatbots or live narration.

How Qwen3-TTS Works (High-Level Overview)

Qwen3-TTS is built using a modern large language model architecture combined with advanced audio tokenization. Instead of treating text understanding and speech generation as separate steps, the system integrates them more tightly.

This design helps the model maintain context, emotion, and style across longer pieces of speech, while also keeping performance efficient.

Common Use Cases

Qwen3-TTS can be used in a wide range of scenarios:

• Voiceovers for videos, tutorials, and presentations
• AI chatbots and virtual assistants
• Accessibility tools such as screen readers
• Game characters and interactive storytelling
• Automated narration for blogs or articles

Because it is open source, users have full control over how and where the model is deployed.

Online Demo

There is an online demo which you can try and decide if you want to install it locally.

Online Demo

Using Qwen3-TTS in ComfyUI

ComfyUI is a node-based visual workflow system commonly used for AI image, video, and audio generation. Community developers have created custom nodes that allow Qwen3-TTS to run directly inside ComfyUI workflows.

One such project is ComfyUI-Qwen-TTS: https://github.com/flybirdxx/ComfyUI-Qwen-TTS

This integration allows users to generate speech as part of a larger AI pipeline, without writing code.

What the ComfyUI Integration Enables

With the Qwen3-TTS custom nodes in ComfyUI, users can:

• Convert text directly into speech audio
• Use voice cloning from reference samples
• Control voice style and language
• Chain TTS with other nodes, such as video or animation workflows

This is especially useful for creators who already use ComfyUI for image-to-video or animation projects and want to add natural-sounding voice output.

Typical Setup Workflow (High-Level)

A common setup process includes:

1. Downloading the Qwen3-TTS workflow.
2. Installing the ComfyUI-Qwen-TTS custom nodes
3. Installing required Python dependencies in the ComfyUI environment
4. Restarting ComfyUI and building a workflow using the TTS nodes

Because the integration is community-driven, users may occasionally encounter dependency or environment issues. However, the project is actively evolving, and updates are frequent. Tip: Install Sage Attention to improve the inference speed.

Conclusion

Qwen3-TTS is a powerful and flexible open-source text-to-speech system that delivers natural voice quality, multilingual support, and advanced features like voice cloning and voice design. Its performance and openness make it suitable for both experimentation and real-world applications.

The availability of ComfyUI integration further expands its usefulness, allowing speech generation to become part of visual and multimedia AI workflows. For creators, developers, and AI enthusiasts, Qwen3-TTS represents an exciting step forward in open-source voice technology.

References

• https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/qwen-tts-realtime
• https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/qwen-tts-voice-cloning
• https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/qwen-tts-voice-design
• https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-TTS/blob/main/finetuning