---
id: "2026-08-25-breeze-tts-2"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-08-25-breeze-tts-2/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2026-08-25"
date_precision: day
category: open-source
importance: 3
confidence: medium
status: [Partly confirmed]
sources: 4
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-08-25-breeze-tts-2/

# BreezeBlue releases Breeze TTS 2, the new top open-weights text-to-speech model

On 2026-08-25 BreezeBlue published weights and inference code for Breeze TTS 2, a 3B text-to-speech model with voice cloning, voice design and voice direction and under-40 ms time-to-first-audio on an H100. It became the highest-rated open-weights model on the Artificial Analysis Speech Arena (~1,206-1,215 Elo, about 90 points above Fish Audio S2 Pro), though its weights are licensed for research/non-commercial use only.

## Key facts
- 3B params; cloning, text-described voice design, voice direction, vocal events in one checkpoint
- TTFA <40 ms on H100 (fast path), streaming RTF 0.32; needs 12-24 GB VRAM
- Artificial Analysis: #1 open weights, ~#6 overall at launch; open-weights top 5 in late Sept 2026: Breeze TTS 2, Fish Audio S2 Pro, Step Audio EditX, Voxtral TTS, Kokoro 82M
- Weights: BreezeBlue Research and Non-Commercial License; code Apache-2.0; commercial use via breezeblue.ai subscription
- Model card lists English + Chinese; AA post cites 50 languages (unresolved)

## What happened

BreezeBlue, a lab little known before this release, opened the weights of Breeze TTS 2 on Hugging Face and GitHub. A single 3B checkpoint does zero-shot cloning, voice design from a prompt, emotional/tonal direction, and real-time bilingual streaming.

## Why it matters

It pushed the open-weights ceiling in TTS about 90 Elo higher, narrowing the gap to closed leaders (Eleven v4, Cartesia Sonic-3.6). "Open" here is weights-available but non-commercial, like Fish Audio S2 Pro and Higgs TTS 3. For commercially free options, MIT/Apache models such as Chatterbox and Kokoro remain the choice.
Confidence is medium: the organisation is new, and its language coverage is reported inconsistently.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): 117 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): 56 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): 147 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): 86 days after its cutoff

## Sources

1. [Hugging Face: BreezeBlue/Breeze-TTS-2](https://huggingface.co/BreezeBlue/Breeze-TTS-2) (huggingface.co, code)
2. [GitHub: breezeblue-ai/breeze-tts](https://github.com/breezeblue-ai/breeze-tts) (github.com, code)
3. [Artificial Analysis open-weights TTS leaderboard](https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-speech/leaderboard/provider-voice/open-weights) (artificialanalysis.ai, official)
4. [Artificial Analysis on X: Breeze TTS 2 leads open-weights TTS](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2092399623839326550) (x.com, discussion)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2026-09-28: [ElevenLabs launches Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo, #1 on Artificial Analysis TTS arena](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-09-28-elevenlabs-eleven-v4/index.md)
- 2026-03-23: [Mistral releases Voxtral TTS, an open-weight 4B text-to-speech model with 3-second voice cloning](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-03-23-mistral-voxtral-tts/index.md)
- 2026-03-09: [Fish Audio open-sources S2](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-03-09-fish-audio-s2-open-source/index.md)
- Models: [Breeze TTS 2](https://postcutoff.com/m/breeze-tts-2/) (`breeze-tts-2`)
- Archived: 1 post, listed in https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-08-25-breeze-tts-2/index.json