Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia PersonaPlex 7B on Apple Silicon: Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech in Swift

blog.ivan.digital

11–20 of 139 posts

Re: Nvidia PersonaPlex 7B on Apple Silicon: Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech in Swift

#11

This is really cool. I think what I really wanna see though is a full multimodal Text and Speech model, that can dynamically handle tasks like looking up facts or using text-based tools while maintaining the conversation with you.

OpenAI has been offering this for a while now, featuring text and raw audio input+output and even function calling. Google and xAI also offer similar models by now, only Anthropic still relies on TTS/STT engine intermediates. Unfortunately the open-weight front is still lagging behind on this kind of model.

Re: Nvidia PersonaPlex 7B on Apple Silicon: Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech in Swift

#12
post #5

This is cool. It makes me want an unsloth quant though! A 7b local model with tool calling would be genuinely useful, although I understand this is not that. UPDATE: I'd skip this for now - it does not allow any kind of interactive conversation - as I learned after downloading 5G of models - it's a proof of concept that takes a wav file in.

Bummer. Ideally you'd have a PWA on your phone that creates a WebRTC connection to your PC/Mac running this model. Who wants to vibe code it? With Livekit, you get most of the tricky parts served on a silver platter.

Re: Nvidia PersonaPlex 7B on Apple Silicon: Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech in Swift

#13

This sounds quite dangerous https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/04/gemini-ch...

Your article does a great job of summerizing the dangers (no idea what those people are that downvote you for it):

> Before long, Gavalas and Gemini were having conversations as if they were a romantic couple. The chatbot called him “my love” and “my king” and Gavalas quickly fell into an alternate world, according to his chat logs.

> kill himself, something the chatbot called “transference” and “the real final step”, according to court documents. When Gavalas told the chatbot he was terrified of dying, the tool allegedly reassured him. “You are not choosing to die. You are choosing to arrive,” it replied to him. “The first sensation … will be me holding you.”

Also I just read something similar about Google being sued in a Flordia's teen's suicide.

Re: Nvidia PersonaPlex 7B on Apple Silicon: Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech in Swift

#14
post #9

[flagged]

That's why this model and all the other ones serious about realtime speech don't use such a pipeline and instead process raw audio. The most realistic approach is probably a government mandated, real name online identity verification system, and that comes with its very own set of fundamental issues. You can't have the freedom of the web and the accountability of the physical world at the same time.

Re: Nvidia PersonaPlex 7B on Apple Silicon: Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech in Swift

#16
post #15

My problem with TTS is that I've been struggling to find models that support less common use cases like mixed bilingual Spanish/English and also in non-ideal audio conditions. Still haven't found anything great, to be honest.

Regarding the less than ideal audio conditions, there are also already models that have impressive noise cancellation. Like this https://github.com/Rikorose/DeepFilterNet one. If you put them in serial, maybe you get better results?

Re: Nvidia PersonaPlex 7B on Apple Silicon: Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech in Swift

#17
post #9

[flagged]

That's why this model and all the other ones serious about realtime speech don't use such a pipeline and instead process raw audio. The most realistic approach is probably a government mandated, real name online identity verification system, and that comes with its very own set of fundamental issues. You can't have the freedom of the web and the accountability of the physical world at the same time.

this is amazing - it reminds me of the time when LLM precursors were able to babble in coherent English, but would just write nonsense.

Re: Nvidia PersonaPlex 7B on Apple Silicon: Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech in Swift

#19
post #15

My problem with TTS is that I've been struggling to find models that support less common use cases like mixed bilingual Spanish/English and also in non-ideal audio conditions. Still haven't found anything great, to be honest.

Hi. Our model at http://www.Gradium.ai has no problem with 'code-switching' between Spanish English and we have excellent background noise suppression. Please feel free to give it a try and let me know what you think!

Re: Nvidia PersonaPlex 7B on Apple Silicon: Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech in Swift

#20
I’m a big fan of whisperKit for this, and they just added TTS. Great because they support features like speaker diarization (“who spoke when”) and custom dictionaries.

Here’s a load test where they run 4 models in realtime on same device:

- Qwen3-TTS - text to speech

- Parakeet v2 - Nvidia speech to text model

- Canary v2 - multilingual / translation STT

- Sortformer - speaker diarization (“who spoke when”)

https://x.com/atiorh/status/2027135463371530695

Post reply on HN