Ollama, the popular app for running AI models locally, announced that its Mac app now supports text-to-speech generation, with Windows and Linux support coming soon. The platform lets users download and run open AI models locally on their Macs, or access more powerful models through the cloud. Ollama itself is open-source and has become one of the most popular AI projects on Git Hub, with nearly 185,000 stars and around 18,600 forks.
On macOS, Ollama uses Apple's MLX, an open-source machine learning framework that leverages Apple Silicon's unified memory architecture. Ollama recently announced support for Phonon, a family of text-to-speech models developed by Gradium, marking the first time the platform supports speech generation. Speech is generated in real time, so users can listen to AI-generated responses as they're being produced.
Phonon supports five languages (English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese) with separate models for each, as well as a multilingual model. Thanks to Apple's MLX framework, Ollama achieved 35% faster speech generation than Gradium's own implementation in tests on a MacBook Pro with M5 Max. The new speech models are available now for Apple Silicon Macs running Ollama 0.40.11 or later.
Source: 9to5Mac · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing