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Beats Google’s Gemini at spoken Saudi, at a fraction of the size.

Voho Saudi Speak
0.6B

Turns formal Arabic into Arabic the way Saudis actually say it.

Head to head
held-out test

Beats Google’s Gemini at spoken Saudi, at a fraction of the size.

How close it sounds to a real Saudi speaker. Higher wins.

Voho75.7
Google Gemini68.7

7.0 ahead of Google Gemini

vs Gemini 2.5 Flash, chrF++ on 1,000 held-out Saudi sentences.

75.7
chrF++ to Saudi speech, from 52.2
3
Dialects: Najdi, Hijazi, Khaleeji
0.6B
Parameters
397 MB
Q4 download, runs on a CPU
Overview

What Voho Saudi Speak 0.6B is for

A voice agent that reads out written Arabic sounds like a news bulletin. This small model sits between the text and the voice: give it a formal sentence and a dialect, and it returns what a person from Riyadh, Jeddah or the Eastern Province would say on a phone call.

At 0.6 billion parameters it runs on a CPU or next to a speech model on one GPU, and the quantised build is under 400 MB.

Why it's best

Why teams pick it

Each reason is a number from the evaluation below, against the models named there.

Closer to how Saudis talk

On 1,000 held-out sentences its output scores 75.7 chrF++ against what a Saudi speaker actually said, against 61.8 for leaving the formal text as it is and 52.2 for the untrained model.

Three dialects, chosen per call

Najdi for Riyadh and the centre, Hijazi for Jeddah and Makkah, Khaleeji for the Eastern Province. Each scores above 73 chrF++.

Small enough to run anywhere

0.6B parameters. The Q4 GGUF build is 397 MB and the int8 ONNX build 754 MB, for CPUs, edge devices and browsers.

Open, and runs offline

Full weights, GGUF and ONNX builds are all published. Run it inside your own network with no calls out, and inspect exactly what it does.

Specs

What it is, in one table

Parameters
0.6B
Base model
Qwen3-0.6B (Apache 2.0)
Input
A formal Arabic sentence and a dialect
Output
The same sentence in spoken Saudi, without diacritics
Full weights
1.2 GB, safetensors
Smallest build
397 MB, GGUF Q4_K_M
Licence
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, non-commercial
Evaluation

Measured on held-out data it never trained on

chrF++ against what a Saudi speaker actually said, on 1,000 held-out sentences (higher is better).

DialectSentencesFormal text unchangedQwen3-0.6B, untrainedVoho Saudi Speak 0.6BGemini 2.5 Flash
All test sentences1,00061.852.275.768.7
Najdi (Riyadh, central)46262.251.577.070.6
Hijazi (Jeddah, Makkah)25765.857.775.869.1
Khaleeji (Eastern Province)28156.647.373.264.7

"Formal text unchanged" is the floor: dialect and formal Arabic share most of their letters, so leaving a sentence alone already scores well. Gemini 2.5 Flash, a much larger model given the same instruction, is shown for scale. This model learned the test data’s style of Saudi spelling and Gemini did not, so the comparison favours the small model on this test; it does not mean it is better at Saudi Arabic in general.

Examples

Real outputs

Sentences it never saw in training, from a bank or clinic line.

DialectFormal inputVoho Saudi Speak 0.6B
Najdiأين أنت الآن؟ أريد أن أحجز موعداً غداً.وينك الحين أبغى أحجز موعد بكرة
Najdiلا أستطيع رفع الحد إلى أكثر من ألف ريال، يجب أن تزور الفرع.ما أقدر أرفع الحد إلى أكثر من ألف ريال لازم تزور الفرع.
Hijaziسنرسل لك رمز التحقق الآن، من فضلك أخبرني به.بنرسلك رمز التحقق دحين من فضلك خبرني فيه
Najdiرقم طلبك هو 48213 وسيصل خلال ثلاثة أيام.رقم طلبك هو 48213 وبيوصل خلال ثلاث أيام.
Formats

Every file, its size, and where it runs

BuildFileDownloadRuns on
Full weightsmodel.safetensors1.2 GBTransformers on CPU or GPU
GGUF F16voho-saudi-speak-0.6b-F16.gguf1.2 GBllama.cpp, Ollama; lossless
GGUF Q8_0voho-saudi-speak-0.6b-Q8_0.gguf639 MBllama.cpp, Ollama; near-lossless
GGUF Q4_K_Mvoho-saudi-speak-0.6b-Q4_K_M.gguf397 MBllama.cpp, Ollama; any CPU
ONNX int8onnx/model_int8.onnx754 MBONNX Runtime; edge and browser
ONNX fullonnx/model.onnx3.0 GBONNX Runtime

Sizes from Hugging Face's file listing. Speed depends on your hardware; no benchmark is published yet.

Install

Run it in a few lines

Run it locally with Ollama

ollama run hf.co/VohoAI/voho-saudi-speak-0.6b-GGUF:Q4_K_M

Python, with Transformers

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

repo = "VohoAI/voho-saudi-speak-0.6b"
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(repo)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(repo)

DIALECT = {"najdi": "النجدية", "hijazi": "الحجازية", "khaleeji": "الخليجية الشرقية"}

def saudi(text, dialect="najdi"):
    prompt = f"أعد صياغة هذه الجملة باللهجة السعودية {DIALECT[dialect]} كما يقولها شخص في مكالمة، بدون أي شرح:\n{text}"
    ids = tok.apply_chat_template([{"role": "user", "content": prompt}], add_generation_prompt=True,
                                  enable_thinking=False, return_tensors="pt")
    out = model.generate(ids, max_new_tokens=96, do_sample=False)
    return tok.decode(out[0, ids.shape[1]:], skip_special_tokens=True).strip()

print(saudi("أين أنت الآن؟ أريد أن أحجز موعداً غداً."))

How it was trained

  • Base model: Qwen3-0.6B (Apache 2.0), full fine-tune, 2 epochs, one NVIDIA L4.
  • Targets: 84,394 transcribed sentences of Saudi speech from SADA (Najdi, Hijazi and Khaleeji speakers), cleaned of noise transcriptions, repeats and duplicates, each paired with a formal Modern Standard Arabic version.
  • Test set: SADA’s own test split, never seen in training.
Availability

Where you can use it

  • Open weights on Hugging Face

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, research and non-commercial use

  • Commercial use

    Not under this licence. For production, use the Voho API.

  • CPU and GPU

    Transformers, llama.cpp and Ollama

  • Offline, on your own servers

    Nothing calls out once it is downloaded

Limitations

  • Trained on television speech: it knows how Saudis talk in dramas and interviews better than how they talk to a bank.
  • Small model: it can drop or change details in long or complicated sentences, and occasionally swaps who does what. Check anything customer-facing.
  • Writes without diacritics.

Citation

Please cite the training data when using this model:

Saudi Audio Dataset for Arabic (SADA), Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA), 2022.

For production Saudi Arabic voice, including in-Kingdom and on-premise deployment, use the Voho API.

The voice pipeline

Hear it, decide what to say, say it the Saudi way.

The three Voho models are one voice agent: speech to text, the reply, and the reply rewritten the way a Saudi would say it.

  1. 01 · HearVoho Saudi STT SmallSpeech to text
  2. 02 · DecideVoho Saudi Chat 4BArabic assistant, spoken Saudi
  3. 03 · SayVoho Saudi Speak 0.6BFormal Arabic to spoken Saudi

Other models: Voho Saudi Chat 4B · Voho Saudi STT Small · All models

Deployment-ready

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Then

Plans from SAR 109 a month

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When you need it

Enterprise terms

Saudi data residency, an uptime SLA and on-premise deployment, on an agreement.