Kyrgyz Republic Showcases Breakthrough Voice AI at CES

Las Vegas, NV — January 6–9, 2026

The Kyrgyz Republic made a strong impact at CES 2026 by unveiling a new generation of artificial intelligence technologies, highlighting its growing role as an emerging global technology innovator. Central to the country’s presentation was KaniTTS, a groundbreaking open-source text-to-speech (TTS) model developed by AI company NineNineSix.

KaniTTS represents a major leap forward in voice AI performance and accessibility. The model delivers real-time, natural-sounding speech generation that is up to three times faster and up to ten times more cost-efficient than leading commercial TTS solutions, including offerings from ElevenLabs, OpenAI, and Google. Despite its high performance, KaniTTS remains completely open and free, released under the Apache 2.0 license, removing cost and licensing barriers for developers worldwide.

Designed to run efficiently without cloud-scale infrastructure, KaniTTS can generate 15 seconds of high-quality speech in just one second using a consumer-grade NVIDIA RTX 5080 GPU. This enables true real-time voice applications on local hardware, making advanced voice AI accessible to startups, researchers, and independent developers.

The base version of KaniTTS currently supports eight languages: English, German, Korean, Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Kyrgyz, and Japanese. Since its release, the model has been downloaded more than 15,000 times on Hugging Face, gaining international recognition for its speed, expressiveness, and ease of use.

In addition to KaniTTS, the Kyrgyz team also introduced Kyrgyz Whisper, an open-source automatic speech recognition (ASR) model fine-tuned from OpenAI’s Whisper. Trained on approximately 2,000 hours of Kyrgyz-language audio, the model dramatically improved recognition accuracy—reducing Word Error Rate from nearly 100% to just 0.2%. This achievement addresses a long-standing gap in AI support for underrepresented languages and demonstrates the power of focused, local-language training.

The open-source nature of KaniTTS has already enabled developers around the world to build new solutions. External teams have successfully adapted the model for languages such as Vietnamese, Urdu, Creole, and Hausa, showcasing how high-performance open AI can empower communities to create speech technologies tailored to their own languages and markets.

A Country Building Technology for Global Markets

The Kyrgyz Republic’s CES presence reflects a broader transformation of its technology sector. The country is now one of the fastest-growing IT exporters in its region. In 2024, Kyrgyz IT professionals delivered services to clients in more than 63 countries, generating $130 million in IT exports.

The United States is the largest export destination, accounting for roughly 40% of total exports, with more than $50 million in value and active collaboration with companies in Silicon Valley. Over the past five years, Kyrgyzstan’s IT exports have grown 45-fold, signaling a shift toward high-value digital services and proprietary technology development.

The High Technology Park (HTP) of the Kyrgyz Republic supports this growth by bringing together a network of over 500 software companies and 3,000 developers, offering end-to-end solutions for global clients.