VALL-E vs Google Flow Music (formerly Riffusion)

VALL-E is a Microsoft Research text-to-speech model that clones a speaker's voice from a short audio clip and generates new speech from text. It belongs to the audio generation category because it synthesizes natural speech rather than editing existing recordings. The project page hosts sample audio for the original VALL-E model and later variants in the same research family.

Most TTS systems regress continuous waveforms or mel-spectrograms directly. VALL-E instead treats speech as a conditional language modeling task over discrete codes from a neural audio codec. Microsoft trained it on about 60,000 hours of English speech, far larger than typical TTS datasets. A 3-second enrolled recording of an unseen speaker is enough to drive zero-shot synthesis, and the model can keep the emotion and room tone present in that prompt.

The VALL-E family grew beyond the first paper. VALL-E X handles cross-lingual zero-shot TTS, VALL-E R adds phoneme monotonic alignment for more stable speech generation, and VALL-E 2 pairs repetition-aware sampling with grouped code modeling to reach human parity on LibriSpeech and VCTK benchmarks. Related lines like MELLE, FELLE, and PALLE explore continuous mel tokens and hybrid autoregressive plus parallel decoding.

Researchers, speech engineers, and curious listeners use VALL-E to hear what large-scale codec language models can do before building their own pipelines. The public samples are research demos, not a hosted API you can plug into a product without separate licensing and ethics review.

Google Flow Music lets you create full-length songs, remix tracks, and publish music through a conversational studio built on Google's Lyria 3.5 model. riffusion.com now redirects to flowmusic.app, where you chat with Producer like you are in a session, iterate on vocals and arrangement, and export finished tracks.

Unlike one-shot music generators that spit out a clip and stop, Flow Music focuses on iterative editing. Replace and Extend let you swap specific sections or continue a song past its endpoint without regenerating the whole track. You can also direct Veo-powered music videos, split stems, apply audio effects, and vibe-code custom instruments or mini apps inside Spaces.

The free tier includes daily top-up credits and two concurrent generations with no credit card required. Paid plans raise monthly credits, concurrent generation limits, and add member perks. Google acquired the Riffusion team in 2026 and folded the product into Google Labs alongside Lyria and Veo.