---
title: "Voice Cloning"
description: "Clone any voice from a few seconds of reference audio"
---

## Overview

Voicebox can replicate a specific person's voice from a short audio sample — known as **zero-shot voice cloning**. You provide 10-30 seconds of clear speech, the model extracts a voice embedding, and from then on you can generate any text in that voice.

Five engines in 0.4 support cloning:

| Engine                      | Languages | Strengths                                                                  |
| --------------------------- | --------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Qwen3-TTS** (0.6B / 1.7B) | 10        | High-quality multilingual, supports delivery instructions on the same kwarg |
| **Chatterbox Multilingual** | 23        | Broadest language coverage — Arabic, Hindi, Swahili, Hebrew, more          |
| **Chatterbox Turbo**        | English   | Fast 350M model with paralinguistic emotion tags (`[laugh]`, `[sigh]`)     |
| **LuxTTS**                  | English   | Lightweight (~1 GB VRAM), 48 kHz output, 150x realtime on CPU              |
| **TADA** (1B / 3B)          | 10        | Speech-language model with 700s+ coherent long-form generation             |

<Callout type="info">
  Don't want to record audio? Use a curated voice from Kokoro or Qwen CustomVoice instead — see [Preset Voices](/overview/preset-voices).
</Callout>

## How It Works

<Steps>
  <Step title="Upload or Record Sample">
    Provide 10-30 seconds of clear speech from the target voice
  </Step>
  <Step title="Engine Analysis">
    The selected engine analyzes vocal characteristics, tone, and speaking patterns
  </Step>
  <Step title="Voice Profile Created">
    A voice embedding is generated and stored with your profile
  </Step>
  <Step title="Generate Speech">
    Use the profile to generate any text in the cloned voice
  </Step>
</Steps>

## Choosing an Engine for Cloning

Different engines suit different use cases. The profile grid greys out unsupported engines so you can switch easily.

| If you want…                                       | Pick                  |
| -------------------------------------------------- | --------------------- |
| Best overall quality on a few common languages     | **Qwen3-TTS 1.7B**    |
| Faster generation, slightly lower quality          | **Qwen3-TTS 0.6B**    |
| Languages outside Qwen's 10 (Arabic, Hindi, etc.)  | **Chatterbox Multilingual** |
| Expressive English with `[laugh]` `[sigh]` tags    | **Chatterbox Turbo**  |
| CPU-only or GPU-light setup, English               | **LuxTTS**            |
| Long-form generation (audiobooks, full chapters)   | **TADA 3B**           |

## Best Practices

### Sample Quality

<Cards>
  <Card title="Do">
    - Use 10-30 seconds of audio
    - Clear, consistent speaking
    - Minimal background noise
    - Natural speaking pace
  </Card>
  <Card title="Don't">
    - Very short clips (< 5 seconds)
    - Heavy background noise
    - Music or overlapping voices
    - Heavily processed audio
  </Card>
</Cards>

### Multiple Samples

Adding multiple samples from the same speaker can improve quality:

- Different speaking styles (casual, formal)
- Different emotions (happy, serious)
- Different recording conditions

<Callout type="info">
  The model will learn a more robust representation from diverse samples. Especially helpful for distinctive voices the model might otherwise smooth over.
</Callout>

## Supported Languages by Engine

- **Qwen3-TTS** — English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian (10)
- **Chatterbox Multilingual** — Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish (23)
- **Chatterbox Turbo** — English
- **LuxTTS** — English
- **TADA 3B** — 10 multilingual; **TADA 1B** — English

For complete language tables and engine-specific notes, see the [TTS Engines developer guide](/developer/tts-engines).

## Limitations

<Callout type="warn">
  Voice cloning should only be used with consent. Ensure you have permission to clone someone's voice. See the project's [SECURITY.md](https://github.com/jamiepine/voicebox/blob/main/SECURITY.md) and your local laws on synthetic voice content.
</Callout>

- Quality depends on sample clarity — noisy samples produce noisy clones
- Works best with consistent speaking tone within a sample
- May struggle with extreme accents or speech impediments
- Background noise reduces quality and can introduce artifacts

## Next Steps

<Cards>
  <Card title="Creating Voice Profiles" href="/overview/creating-voice-profiles">
    Step-by-step guide to creating profiles
  </Card>
  <Card title="Preset Voices" href="/overview/preset-voices">
    Use built-in voices instead of cloning
  </Card>
  <Card title="Generating Speech" href="/overview/generating-speech">
    Use a profile to generate audio
  </Card>
</Cards>
