A beginner's guide to the Higgs-Audio-V2 model by Lucataco on Replicate
Source: Dev.to
Overview
The higgs-audio-v2 model is an audio foundation model developed by Lucataco. It is trained on over 10 million hours of diverse audio data and is designed for expressive text‑to‑speech (TTS) generation without the need for extensive fine‑tuning. The model leverages a deep understanding of both language and acoustics to produce high‑quality speech.
Performance
-
EmergentTTS‑Eval benchmarks
- Emotional category: 75.7 % win rate over GPT‑4o‑mini‑TTS
- Question category: 55.7 % win rate over GPT‑4o‑mini‑TTS
-
Compared with similar models such as xtts‑v2 and whisperspeech‑small, higgs‑audio‑v2 shows superior handling of nuanced emotional expression and complex speech scenarios, all without requiring post‑training optimization.
Usage
The model accepts plain text input together with a set of optional configuration parameters that influence the characteristics of the generated audio.
Parameters
| Parameter | Description | Range / Options | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
text | The input text to convert to speech. | – | "The sun rises in the east and sets in the west" |
temperature | Controls randomness in generation; lower values produce more deterministic outputs. | 0.1 – 1 | 0.3 |
top_p | Nucleus sampling parameter that controls diversity of generated audio. | 0.1 – 1 | 0.95 |
top_k | Limits the vocabulary to the top‑k tokens for sampling. | 1 – 100 | 50 |
max_new_tokens | Maximum number of audio tokens to generate. | 256 – 2048 | 1024 |
scene_description | Contextual description for the audio environment (e.g., recording setting). | – | "Audio is recorded from a quiet room" |
system_message | Optional custom system message for additional control. | – | none |
Generating Audio
- Provide the
textyou wish to synthesize. - Adjust any of the optional parameters to shape the output (e.g., change
temperaturefor more or less variation). - Submit the request to the model endpoint.
The model returns a high‑quality WAV file containing the synthesized speech.
Output
- Audio file: A WAV‑format file with the generated speech, ready for playback or further processing.