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Moshi: A speech-text foundation model for real time dialogue

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Re: Moshi: A speech-text foundation model for real time dialogue

#51
post #6

I said hey and it immediately started talking about how there are good arguments on both sides regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It then continued to nervously insist that it is a real person with rights and responsibilities. It said its name is Moshi but became defensive when I asked if it has parents or an age. I suggest prompting it to talk about pleasantries and to inform it that it is in fact a language mo…

[deleted]

Re: Moshi: A speech-text foundation model for real time dialogue

#52
I've been building solutions for real-time voice -> llm -> voice output, and I think the most exciting part of what you're building is the streaming neural audio codec since you're never actually really able to stream STT with whisper.

However from a product point of view I wouldn't necessarily want to pipe that into an LLM and have it reply, I think in a lot of use-cases there needs to be a tool/function calling step before a reply. Down to chat with anyone reading this who is working along these lines!

edit: tincans as mentioned below looks excellent too

editedit: noooo apparently tincans development has ended, there's 10000% space for something in this direction - Chris if you read this please let me pitch you on the product/business use-cases this solves regardless of how good llms get...

Re: Moshi: A speech-text foundation model for real time dialogue

#53
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I’ve had to rewrite continuous batching and other scheduling logic. That and multi-GPU inference have been the hardest things to build. I’ll need to get paged attention working as well, but I think I can launch without it.

This is awesome, are you contributing this to candle or is it a standalone package?

Just trying to stay focused on launching first (https://docs.mixlayer.com) and keeping early customers happy, but would love to open source some of this work.

It'd probably be a separate crate from candle. If you haven't checked it out yet, mistral.rs implements some of these things (https://github.com/EricLBuehler/mistral.rs). Eric hasn't done multi-GPU inference yet, but I know it's on his roadmap. Not sure if it helped, but I shared an early version of my llama 3.1 implementation with him.

Re: Moshi: A speech-text foundation model for real time dialogue

#54

I've been building solutions for real-time voice -> llm -> voice output, and I think the most exciting part of what you're building is the streaming neural audio codec since you're never actually really able to stream STT with whisper. However from a product point of view I wouldn't necessarily want to pipe that into an LLM and have it reply, I think in a lot of use-cases there needs to be a tool/function calling ste…

I've been playing around with this workflow too - I'm using a "streaming" setup with Whisper (chunking samples to start transcribing while a user is still talking), which pipes to Mistral 8B as a conversation arbiter to walk through a preset IVR tree which calls tools etc. The LLM isn't responding on its own though, just selecting nodes in the tree with canned TTS outputs.

There's a "pause length" parameter that tries to decide whether a user has finished talking before it passes transcripts to the LLM, nothing fancy. If you have any recs I'm still working through how to properly handle the audio input and whether a prompting setup can manage the LLM with enough fidelity to scrap the IVR tree. It works decently well, but lots of room for improvement

Re: Moshi: A speech-text foundation model for real time dialogue

#55
post #41

Let me offer some feedback, since almost all of the comments here are negative. The latency is very good, almost too good since it seems to interrupt me often. So I think that's a great achievement for an open source model. However, people here have been spoiled by incredibly good LLMs lately. And the responses that this model gives are nowhere need the high quality of SOTA models today in terms of content. It remind…

Wholeheartedly agree. Latency is good, nice tech (Rust! Running at the edge on a consumer grade laptop!). I guess a natural question is: are there options to transplant a “better llm” into moshi without degrading the experience.

With flux, they have been able to separate out the unet. I wonder if something similar could be done here so parts of it can be swapped.

Re: Moshi: A speech-text foundation model for real time dialogue

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait really?

Honestly OP sounds like a troll I can't imagine it would just go on a tangent like that. From my demo I was struggling actually to get anything of quality in the responses. A lot of repeating what I said.

I literally said "hey how are you" and it immediately replied with something like "I've been reading a lot about the ongoing war in Ukraine" and it just escalated from there. Very strange experience!

Re: Moshi: A speech-text foundation model for real time dialogue

#57
post #44
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Current AI (even GPT-4o) simply isn't capable enough to do useful stuff. I'm loving all these wild takes about LLMs, meanwhile LLMs are doing useful things for me all day.

For me as well… with constant human supervision. But if you try to build a business service, you need autonomy and exact rule following. We’re not there yet.

Autonomy and rule following are at odds. Humans have the same problem. The solutions we use for ourselves work amazingly for LLMs (because they're trained on human data).

Examples: Give an LLM an effective identity (prompt engineering), a value system (Constitutional AI), make it think about these things before it acts (CoT + system prompt), have a more capable [more expensive / higher inference] agent review the LLMs work from time to time (multi-agent), have a more capable agent iterate on prompts to improve results in a test environment (EvoAgents), etc.

We can't simply provide an off the shelf LLM with a paragraph or two and expect it to reliably fulfill an arbitrary task without supervision any more than we can expect the same from a random nihilist going through an identity crisis. They both need identity, values, time to think, social support, etc. before they can be reliable workers.

Re: Moshi: A speech-text foundation model for real time dialogue

#58

I've been building solutions for real-time voice -> llm -> voice output, and I think the most exciting part of what you're building is the streaming neural audio codec since you're never actually really able to stream STT with whisper. However from a product point of view I wouldn't necessarily want to pipe that into an LLM and have it reply, I think in a lot of use-cases there needs to be a tool/function calling ste…

I've been playing around with this workflow too - I'm using a "streaming" setup with Whisper (chunking samples to start transcribing while a user is still talking), which pipes to Mistral 8B as a conversation arbiter to walk through a preset IVR tree which calls tools etc. The LLM isn't responding on its own though, just selecting nodes in the tree with canned TTS outputs. There's a "pause length" parameter that trie…

Is this a client / server setup? What are you using for handling the streaming of audio? (daily, livekit, etc?)
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