Ollama 0.40.11 adds text-to-speech, starting with Phonon, 35% faster than Gradium's own runtime on an M5 Max
The local model runner now does speech output. This covers what Phonon supports, how to call it, and the licensing catch.
// Key points
- The first speech model is Phonon, a small TTS family from Gradium. It runs on macOS only for now (Apple Silicon, accelerated by MLX), with Windows and Linux coming later, and needs Ollama 0.40.11 or later.
- On a MacBook Pro with M5 Max, Ollama measured 35% faster than the next fastest engine, Gradium's own runtime, and matched the reference Hugging Face Transformers implementation's word error rate on 200 Seed-TTS English sentences.
- It works with the OpenAI-compatible /v1/audio/speech endpoint, so existing OpenAI SDK code only needs a new base URL. Audio streams as it is generated, 24 kHz mono, WAV by default or raw PCM.
- phonon itself is Apache 2.0; the 40M French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and multilingual models are CC BY-NC 4.0, noncommercial only.
Builder's takeFor a product that has to speak, like AI Interview, I'd prototype local voice on a Mac with Phonon first; the interface matches OpenAI's, so switching back to the cloud costs almost nothing. Check the license before launch, though: only the English model is commercial-use, there's no Chinese, and the multilingual ones are noncommercial.
// Background · from #Open models
Full timeline →- Oct 26 Google details TB screening in the field: a partner device has read 25,000 chest X-rays, and open MedGemma has passed 10 million downloads
- Oct 25 Hugging Face launches a Trainium compatibility lookup: whether a Hub model runs unmodified on Trainium, with a script to run it yourself
- Oct 25 Tencent's WeChat Vision team open-sources WeVisOne-VL 2B and 4B under Apache 2.0: one model for detection, grounding, counting, OCR, segmentation and matting