Fiste AI

Not released yet  /  Nepali text-to-speech

सुसेलीSuseli, a voice for Nepali.

You type Nepali, it reads it back the way a person from here would say it. That is the whole idea, and it turns out to be hard.

The fiste logo: a small bird's head over the Himalaya, above the word fiste

In training

We are still training and listening. The weights go up on Hugging Face when they sound right, not before.

Early samples

  1. नमस्ते! म सुसेली हुँ, नेपाली बोल्न सिकिरहेको एउटा सानो आवाज।

    Hello! I’m Suseli, a small voice learning to speak Nepali.

    0:05

  2. के तपाईंलाई थाहा छ, फिस्टो चरा देखिनुभन्दा पहिले नै यसको सुसेली सुनिन्छ?

    Did you know you hear a warbler’s whistle before you ever see the bird?

    0:06

  3. बिहान सबेरै पोखराबाट हेर्दा, माछापुच्छ्रेको टुप्पो घामले सुनौलो बनाउँछ।

    Seen from Pokhara at dawn, the sun turns the tip of Machhapuchhre gold.

    0:06

  4. काठमाडौंका साँघुरा गल्लीहरूमा पुराना मन्दिर र नयाँ कफी पसलहरू सँगसँगै उभिएका छन्।

    In Kathmandu’s narrow lanes, old temples and new coffee shops stand side by side.

    0:07

Why we are doing this

Most Nepali voices you hear from a computer sound like a word list being read out loud.

They get the letters right and the sentence wrong. A question comes out flat. The stress lands on the wrong word. Numbers, dates and English words dropped into a Nepali sentence trip them up, and that is how most people actually talk.

We want something you could leave running in a phone menu, a reading app or a screen reader without wincing. That means getting the small things right, and testing it with people who speak Nepali every day.

What we are working on

  1. Sounding like speech स्वाभाविक बोली

    Clear pronunciation, natural pauses, and the rise at the end of a question.

  2. Tone of voice भाव

    Asking it to read something calmly, cheerfully or seriously, and having it actually do that.

  3. More than one voice धेरै आवाज

    A few built-in voices, plus making a new one from a short recording, but only of someone who has said yes.

  4. Running on your own machine सानो र छिटो

    A small version for an ordinary laptop or a phone, so it works without sending your text anywhere.

The name

सुसेलीsuseli

फिस्टेfiste

सुसेली is the tune you whistle to yourself without thinking about it, walking somewhere or waiting for tea.

फिस्टो, or फिस्टे, is what we call the small warblers you hear in the hills before you see them. One of them is even named for the sound: the सुसेली फिस्टो, the Whistler's warbler.

So the logo is one of those birds, looking out over the mountains.

A note on voices

A voice belongs to the person it came from. Suseli will only make a new voice from a recording you have the right to use.

Its licence will not allow pretending to be someone else, or using a cloned voice to trick people. We would rather ship later than ship something that makes that easy.