PICO-1.

Overview

PICO-1 entered development on August 13, 2026 as the first model in the PICO series, our custom text-to-speech line. PICO is built to be expressive and aware of what it is producing: where most TTS systems are judged on output quality alone, PICO is also judged on how quickly it can begin. We treat time-to-first-audio as a first-class deliverable, not a side effect of generation speed.

PICO-1 is designed around a custom streaming system. As PICO generates audio, it produces it in short pieces called frames. Those frames pass into a buffer that holds them in order until the previous frame has played. As soon as the buffer has its first frame, playback begins, and the buffer keeps handing frames to the audio output in sequence as PICO keeps producing.

The buffer also acts as a safety layer: every frame passes through it and is stored until it is its turn to play, so frames cannot be lost or outrun the speaker. If PICO slows down under load, frames simply queue instead of starving the output.

Since we set a clear order of priority across projects, PICO-1 continues at a reduced pace, last in line behind Kova, Deriva-1, and Hikaru-1. See Evaluating scope for the full reasoning.