Voice emotion control is leaving the markup. Kakao's Kanana-o model, detailed on its tech blog on August 4, 2026, now takes plain-language instructions like "read it in a sad voice" or "read it in a Gyeongsang dialect" and reflects them in speed, volume, pitch, emotion, intonation, and intensity. On the Korean InstructTTSEval benchmark it scores 94.50, ahead of OpenAI's GPT-4o-mini-tts at 91.10 and just behind Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview TTS at 95.38.
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