At the world’s largest technology exhibition CES 2026, Kyrgyzstan presented its own artificial intelligence development capable of competing with leading global solutions, the High Technology Park reported.
The highlight is KaniTTS, a breakthrough open-source text-to-speech (TTS) model developed by the Kyrgyz AI startup NineNineSix. The technology delivers live, natural-sounding speech generation in real time and operates three times faster and up to ten times cheaper than current state-of-the-art TTS services, including solutions from ElevenLabs, OpenAI, and Google.
«KaniTTS demonstrates performance comparable to the commercial models of global technology leaders while remaining fully open and free (Apache 2.0 license). The model can generate 15 seconds of natural speech in just one second on a consumer-grade NVIDIA RTX 5080 graphics card, making it suitable for real-world use without expensive cloud infrastructure.
Since its release, KaniTTS has been downloaded more than 15,000 times on the Hugging Face platform, indicating strong interest from the international developer community. The base version of the model already supports eight languages, including Kyrgyz, as well as English, German, Korean, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese,» the statement says.
At the same time, the Kyrgyz team presented Kyrgyz Whisper, an open-source automatic speech recognition model fine-tuned on the basis of OpenAI’s Whisper. The model was trained on approximately 2,000 hours of Kyrgyz speech and reduced the recognition error rate for the Kyrgyz language from nearly 100 percent to 0.2 percent, addressing one of the key challenges of the global AI market — the lack of high-quality support for underrepresented languages.
Thanks to KaniTTS’s open architecture, it is already being used by independent developers worldwide. Based on the model, TTS solutions have been created for languages such as Vietnamese, Urdu, Creole, and Hausa (Africa), expanding access to modern AI technologies for languages and communities that have previously remained outside the focus of major technology corporations, the High Technology Park added.
Kyrgyzstan’s participation in CES 2026 demonstrated that the country not only exports IT services but also creates its own world-class technological products, the statement says.
CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is the world’s largest exhibition of consumer and industrial technologies, held annually in Las Vegas. CES 2026 brings together thousands of technology companies from more than 150 countries, including major global corporations, startups, investors, and leading international media. The exhibition is considered a key platform for showcasing global technology trends and innovations.
