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abstract indexed · arXiv 2610.06817 · updated 2026-10-18

Paradee: Distilling Kokoro-82M into an 8M-Parameter Single-Voice Text-to-Speech Model

First page of Paradee: Distilling Kokoro-82M into an 8M-Parameter Single-Voice Text-to-Speech Model
From the original paper · arXiv 2610.06817Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

It replaces direct deployment of the 82M-parameter, 54-voice Kokoro teacher with an 8.07M-parameter, single-voice student trained separately on the teacher's saved durations, pitch, energy, and phoneme features, then quantized to int8 (8.5 MB). The cost is a teacher-synthesized training corpus, one distillation run per voice, a small quality gap (4.41 vs 4.52 UTMOS), and a phase-locking post-filter added to fix a residual buzz. It can fail if multiple voices are required, if the single target voice does not match the product's needs, or if the phase artifact reappears under acoustic conditions the filter does not cover.

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Why it was shortlisted

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recommendation
adopt
research area
distillation
technical change
Teacher-student distillation of a TTS model into a single-voice int8 student
published
2026-10-05

For a team with one GPU or CPU-only production targets, an 8.5 MB model with released code and weights that runs 25x faster than real time on one CPU thread is immediately deployable, provided a single voice is acceptable.

About the technical core

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
    Read the brief interpretation

    It replaces direct deployment of the 82M-parameter, 54-voice Kokoro teacher with an 8.07M-parameter, single-voice student trained separately on the teacher's saved durations, pitch, energy, and phoneme features, then quantized to int8 (8.5 MB). The cost is a teacher-synthesized training corpus, one distillation run per voice, a small quality gap (4.41 vs 4.52 UTMOS), and a phase-locking post-filter added to fix a residual buzz. It can fail if multiple voices are required, if the single target voice does not match the product's needs, or if the phase artifact reappears under acoustic conditions the filter does not cover.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

    Inspect the source
  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    The distilled 8.07M model has 10x fewer parameters, needs 15x less compute than Kokoro-82M, runs 25x faster than real time on one CPU thread, and scores 4.41 UTMOS versus the teacher's 4.52.

    This is a Paperraft inference. It is not pinned to a verified PDF passage.

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quality

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compute and memory

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latency

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operations

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software compatibility

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security

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data and training

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reproducibility

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Provisional research brief updated 2026-10-18. Paperraft has not reproduced this experiment.

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arXiv 2610.06817

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