Natiq Studio Releases Open-Weight Speech Model for Algerian Darija

Natiq Studio has introduced Natiq-dz-ARG, an open-weight text-to-speech model built specifically for Algerian Darija. Standard TTS systems often mispronounce Algerian speech, particularly when French words are mixed into Arabic sentences, a common pattern in everyday conversation. The model was fine-tuned with LoRA on the bosonai/higgs-tts-3-4b foundation model, using more than 300 hours of speech from over 100 speakers. Developers also cleaned up mixed-language transcripts to better preserve French terms and improve code-switching. The model additionally supports zero-shot voice cloning from short reference audio and generates 24 kHz output.