# Habibi: Laying the Open-Source Foundation of Unified-Dialectal Arabic Speech Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13802 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13802/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02111/) (2023)
- [FLEURS: Few-shot Learning Evaluation of Universal Representations of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12446/) (2022)
- [Voicebox: Text-Guided Multilingual Universal Speech Generation at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15687/) (2023)
- [F5-TTS: A Fairytaler that Fakes Fluent and Faithful Speech with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06885/) (2024)
- [CosyVoice: A Scalable Multilingual Zero-shot Text-to-speech Synthesizer based on Supervised Semantic Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05407/) (2024)
- [Seed-TTS: A Family of High-Quality Versatile Speech Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02430/) (2024)
- [MaskGCT: Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Masked Generative Codec Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00750/) (2024)
- [E2 TTS: Embarrassingly Easy Fully Non-Autoregressive Zero-Shot TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18009/) (2024)
- [Spark-TTS: An Efficient LLM-Based Text-to-Speech Model with Single-Stream Decoupled Speech Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01710/) (2025)
- [Large-scale Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning for Automatic Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05777/) (2021)
- [Music Source Separation with Band-split RNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15174/) (2022)
- [FireRedTTS: A Foundation Text-To-Speech Framework for Industry-Level Generative Speech Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03283/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Speech Synthesis without Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08551/) (2024)
- [Speech Recognition Challenge in the Wild: Arabic MGB-3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07276/) (2017)
- [DiTAR: Diffusion Transformer Autoregressive Modeling for Speech Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03930/) (2025)
- [MiniMax-Speech: Intrinsic Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with a Learnable Speaker Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07916/) (2025)
- [QASR: QCRI Aljazeera Speech Resource -- A Large Scale Annotated Arabic Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13000/) (2021)
- [E3 TTS: Easy End-to-End Diffusion-based Text to Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00945/) (2023)
- [ZipVoice: Fast and High-Quality Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13053/) (2025)
- [The MGB-2 Challenge: Arabic Multi-Dialect Broadcast Media Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05625/) (2016)
- [ClArTTS: An Open-Source Classical Arabic Text-to-Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00069/) (2023)
- [ArTST: Arabic Text and Speech Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16621/) (2023)
- [Mixat: A Data Set of Bilingual Emirati-English Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02578/) (2024)
- [SAC: Neural Speech Codec with Semantic-Acoustic Dual-Stream Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16841/) (2025)
- [NADI 2025: The First Multidialectal Arabic Speech Processing Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02038/) (2025)
- [JoyVoice: Long-Context Conditioning for Anthropomorphic Multi-Speaker Conversational Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19090/) (2025)
- [LEMAS: Large A 150K-Hour Large-scale Extensible Multilingual Audio Suite with Generative Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04233/) (2026)
- [M3-TTS: Multi-modal DiT Alignment & Mel-latent for Zero-shot High-fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04720/) (2025)
- [ArVoice: A Multi-Speaker Dataset for Arabic Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20506/) (2025)
- [Towards Zero-Shot Text-To-Speech for Arabic Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16751/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [OmniVoice: Towards Omnilingual Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Diffusion Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00688/) (2026)
- [Dziri Voicebot: An End-to-End Low-Resource Speech-to-Speech Conversational System for Algerian Dialect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26003/) (2026)
- [CARDAMOM: A Micro-Dialectal Arabic Speech Dataset for ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34481/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Arabic spans over 30 spoken varieties, yet no open-source text-to-speech system unifies them. Key barriers include substantial cross-dialect lexical and phonological divergence, scarce synthesis-grade data, and the absence of a standardized multi-dialect evaluation benchmark. We present Habibi, a unified-dialectal Arabic TTS framework that addresses all three. Through a multi-step curation pipeline, we repurpose open-source ASR corpora into TTS training data covering 12+ regional dialects. A linguistically-informed curriculum learning strategy - progressing from Modern Standard Arabic to dialectal data - enables robust zero-shot synthesis without text diacritization. We further release the first standardized multi-dialect Arabic TTS benchmark, comprising over 11,000 utterances across 7 dialect subsets with manually verified transcripts. On this benchmark, our unified model matches or surpasses per-dialect specialized models. Both automatic metrics and human evaluations confirm that Habibi is highly competitive with ElevenLabs' Eleven v3 (alpha) in intelligibility, speaker similarity, and naturalness. Extensive ablations (~8,000 H100 GPU hours, 30+ configurations) validate each design choice. We open-source all checkpoints, training and inference code, and benchmark data - the first such release for multi-dialect Arabic TTS - at https://SWivid.github.io/Habibi/ .