Led by Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s X-LANCE Lab – one of China’s top audiovisual and language processing research entities – the model is named Habibi, meaning “my dear” in Arabic.

In presenting their findings, the research team spearheaded by Chen Yushen described the project in a paper as “the first open-source framework for unified-dialectal Arabic speech synthesis”.

“To the best of our knowledge, research on unified-dialectal Arabic TTS is absent, not to mention an open-source