I revisit my earlier critique of open-source text-to-speech and explain why the landscape has changed with Qwen3-TTS: open weights, strong inference via vLLM-Omni, voice cloning that actually works, and fewer artifacts on long passages. I share notes on fine-tuning a 0.6B base model with a small custom dataset, show sample outputs, and flag remaining caveats like a fine-tuning bug and limited style guidance—concluding that TTS finally doesn’t suck anymore.

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