KRAFTON Releases 9B Bilingual Speech Model

South Korean game developer KRAFTON, best known for the hit title PUBG: Battlegrounds, has released a new open-source AI model focused on audio. The new model, named Raon-Speech-9B, is a 9-billion-parameter system designed for a range of multimodal speech tasks.

The model is bilingual, supporting both English and Korean. Its core capabilities include automatic speech recognition (ASR), which converts spoken language to text, and text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis for generating spoken audio from text. This dual functionality makes it a versatile tool for building sophisticated voice-based applications.

Raon-Speech-9B is a notable release from a company primarily known for gaming, highlighting a broader trend of specialized industries contributing significant models to the open-source community. Its strong support for Korean is also a welcome addition, providing high-quality resources for a language often underserved by major model releases.

KRAFTON has made the model available for research and experimentation on its Hugging Face repository. It is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license, which allows for broad non-commercial use and adaptation.