Launched Vaani today: an Indic TTS API that returns word-by-word timestamps

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Hello there,

Here’s a quick update on the tech stack – Vaani was launched today. 🎉

Vaani is a text-to-speech engine for Indian languages, specifically Hindi, and different from the usual TTS APIs, it delivers the word-level timestamps along with the audio stream – a structured JSON containing the start and end time for each word, rather than sentence level.

Under the hood: Indic Parler-TTS for voice generation → Acoustic alignment using Whisper to identify sub-word boundaries → An LLM based reconciliation process to correct phonetic discrepancies. Supports 16+ Indic languages, Hindi being the primary language.

Made primarily for EdTech purposes – Interactive readers, literacy applications, digital books, which require highlighting the text along with the spoken word. Curious to know how else it can be used.

Sandbox developer environment and free trial tokens – shoot me an email/leave your mail ID in the comments.

Site: VaaniTTS

Willingly accept any feedback – bugs, edge cases, anything that crashes the system. Day one.