Llasa, is a text-to-speech (TTS) system that extends the text-based LLaMA (1B,3B, and 8B) language model by incorporating speech tokens from the XCodec2 codebook, which contains 65,536 tokens. We trained Llasa on a dataset comprising 250,000 hours of Chinese-English speech data. The model is capable of generating speech either solely from input text or by utilizing a given speech prompt.

The method is seamlessly compatible with the Llama framework, making training TTS similar as training LLM (convert audios into single-codebook tokens and simply view it as a special language). It opens the possiblity of existing method for compression, acceleration and finetuning for LLM to be applied.