Nari Labs developed Dia, an open-weights/open-source text-to-speech (TTS) model focused on generating multi-speaker, dialogue-style audio (e.g., podcast-like conversations) from a transcript that includes speaker tags. Dia emphasizes:
- Dialogue generation using tags like `[S1]` / `[S2]`.
- Expressive non-verbal cues like `(laughs)`, `(sighs)`, `(coughs)`, etc.
- Audio conditioning / voice cloning (with ethical disclaimers).
- Local deployment (GPU-first) rather than a managed SaaS-first offering.
Nari Labs later released Dia2 variants designed for streaming dialogue TTS (start speaking before receiving the entire input text), intended for real-time voice applications.
Important nuance: the company website contains promotional content. More detailed technical and usage information is typically available from the Hugging Face model cards and the GitHub repositories.