BISHKEK, KYRGYZSTAN / DUBAI, UAE – The Kyrgyz Republic presented a new generation of artificial intelligence technologies at CES 2026. At the core of the Kyrgyz Republic’s CES presentation is KaniTTS, a breakthrough open-source text-to-speech model developed by NineNineSix. KaniTTS delivers real-time, human-like voice generation that is up to three times faster and up to ten times cheaper than current state-of-the-art commercial TTS services such as ElevenLabs, OpenAI (TTS), and Google (Gemini TTS).
KaniTTS matches the performance of leading commercial voice models from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Hume AI, while remaining fully open and free under the Apache 2.0 license.
Since its release, KaniTTS has been downloaded over 15,000 times on Hugging Face, drawing international attention for its combination of speed, expressivity, and accessibility. The model is capable of generating 15 seconds of natural speech in just 1 second on a consumer-grade NVIDIA RTX 5080 GPU, enabling true real-time performance without cloud-scale infrastructure.
The base model currently supports eight languages: English, German, Korean, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Kyrgyz and Japanese.
Alongside KaniTTS, the team also presented Kyrgyz Whisper, an open-source automatic speech recognition model fine-tuned on OpenAI’s Whisper. Trained on approximately 2,000 hours of Kyrgyz audio, the model achieved a dramatic improvement in recognition quality, reducing Word Error Rate for Kyrgyz from nearly 100% to 0.2, addressing one of the most persistent gaps in global AI -support for underrepresented languages.
Built on its open-source foundation, KaniTTS has already been adopted by external developers, who have used the model to create text-to-speech systems for Vietnamese, Urdu, Creole, and Hausa (Africa). This demonstrates how an open, high-performance voice model can empower communities working with underrepresented languages to develop their own AI solutions. By lowering technical and cost barriers, KaniTTS enables local teams to build speech technologies tailored to their languages and markets — expanding access to AI far beyond traditionally supported languages.
A Country Building Technology for Global Markets
The Kyrgyz Republic has become one of the fastest-growing technology exporters in its region. In 2024, Kyrgyz IT specialists provided services to clients in more than 63 countries, generating $130 million in IT exports.
The United States ranked first, accounting for around 40% of total exports, with an export volume exceeding $50 million, including cooperation with companies in Silicon Valley. Over the past five years, the country’s IT exports have grown 45-fold, marking a structural shift toward high-value digital services and proprietary technology development.
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SOURCE: MEDIA RELEASE
