Two undergrads built an open-source speech AI rivaling ElevenLabs
Korean startup Nari Labs just released Dia, an open-source 1.6B text-to-speech model built by two undergraduates with zero outside funding. The model handles emotional tones, multi-speaker tags, and nonverbal cues like laughter and coughing, outshining commercial leaders like ElevenLabs in benchmark tests. It proves solo builders can now challenge billion-dollar labs.