About Maya1

Maya1 is an open-source speech model built for expressive voice generation with rich human emotion and precise voice design. Developed by Maya Research, this model represents a significant advancement in making high-quality voice AI accessible to everyone.

What is Maya1?

Maya1 is a 3-billion parameter text-to-speech AI model that generates realistic, emotional speech from text using natural language voice descriptions. Instead of requiring complex technical parameters, Maya1 allows you to describe voices the way you would brief a voice actor using plain language.

The model supports over 20 different emotions including laughter, crying, whispering, anger, sighing, and gasping. These emotions can be placed inline within your text using simple tags, allowing for natural and expressive speech output.

Key Features

  • Natural Language Voice Control: Describe voices using plain language without technical parameters.
  • 20+ Inline Emotions: Insert emotion tags directly into text for expressive delivery.
  • Real-Time Streaming: Generate audio in real-time with SNAC neural codec at approximately 0.98 kbps.
  • Single GPU Deployment: Run on a single GPU with 16GB or more VRAM.
  • Apache 2.0 License: Fully open-source with no usage fees or restrictions.
  • Production-Ready: Includes vLLM integration and automatic prefix caching for efficiency.

Technical Architecture

Maya1 uses a 3-billion parameter decoder-only transformer based on the Llama architecture. The model generates SNAC neural codec tokens instead of raw audio waveforms, enabling efficient streaming and generation. The SNAC codec uses a multi-scale hierarchical structure that keeps autoregressive sequences compact while maintaining audio quality at 24 kHz.

Training and Development

The model was pretrained on an internet-scale English speech corpus to learn broad acoustic patterns. Supervised fine-tuning used a curated dataset of studio recordings with human-verified voice descriptions, over 20 emotion tags per sample, multi-accent English coverage, and character variations.

Use Cases

Maya1 is designed for a wide range of applications:

  • Game Character Voices: Generate unique character voices with emotions on-the-fly.
  • Podcast and Audiobook Production: Narrate long-form content with emotional range.
  • AI Voice Assistants: Build conversational agents with natural emotional responses.
  • Video Content Creation: Create voiceovers with expressive delivery.
  • Accessibility Tools: Build screen readers with natural, engaging voices.
  • Customer Service AI: Deploy empathetic voice bots for automated support.

Why Open Source?

Maya Research builds open-source voice AI because voice intelligence should not be a privilege reserved for the few. Most voice models today only work well for a narrow slice of English speakers. By making Maya1 open source under Apache 2.0 license, developers worldwide can build on this work, accelerate research, and create voice AI that serves everyone.

About Maya Research

Maya Research is building voice intelligence for the 90% of the world left behind by mainstream AI.

Note: This is an educational informational website about Maya1, not an official Maya Research website. For official documentation and the latest updates, please visit the official Maya Research website and model repository on Hugging Face.