Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.ivan.digital

31–40 of 139 posts

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

#31
post #26

I really like this, and have actually tried (unsuccessfully) to get PersonaPlex to run on my blackwell device - I will try this on Mac now as well. There are a few caveats here, for those of you venturing in this, since I've spent considerable time looking at these voice agents. First is that a VAD->ASR->LLM->TTS pipeline can still feel real-time with sub-second RTT. For example, see my project https://github.com/aca…

I've been working on building my own voice agent as well for a while and would love to talk to you and swap notes if you have the time. I have many things id like to discuss, but mainly right now im trying to figure out how a full duplex pipeline like this could fit in to an agentic framework. Ive had no issues with the traditional route of stt > llm > tts pipeline as that naturally lends itself with any agentic behavior like tool use, advanced context managemnt systems, rag , etc... I separate the human facing agent from the subagent to reduce latency and context bloat and it works well. While I am happy with the current pipeline I do always keep an eye out for full duplex solutions as they look interesting and feel more dynamic naturally because of the architecture, but every time i visit them i cant wrap my head how you would even begin to implement that as part of a voice agent. I mean sure you have text input and output channels in some of these things but even then with its own context limitations feels like they could never bee anything then a fancy mouthpiece. But this feels like im possibly looking at this from ignorance. anyways would love to talk on discord with a like minded fella. cheers.

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

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”…

Some more details: > The family’s lawyers say he wasn’t mentally ill, but rather a normal guy who was going through a difficult divorce. > Gavalas first started chatting with Gemini about what good video games he should try. > Shortly after Gavalas started using the chatbot, Google rolled out its update to enable voice-based chats, which the company touts as having interactions that “are five times longer than text-b…

> The chatbot took on a persona that Gavalas hadn’t prompted

That's an interesting claim, how can we be sure of it? If Gavalas didn't have to do anything special to elicit the bizarre conspiracy-adjacent content from Gemini Pro, why aren't we all getting such content in our voice chats?

Mind you, the case is still extremely concerning and a severe failure of AI safety. Mass-marketed audio models should clearly include much tighter safeguards around what kinds of scenarios they will accept to "role play" in real time chat, to avoid situations that can easily spiral out of control. And if this was created as role-play, the express denial of it being such from Gemini Pro, and active gaslighting of the user (calling his doubt a "dissociation response") is a straight-out failure in alignment. But this is a very different claim from the one you quoted!

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

#34
From what I've seen, it's really easy to get PersonaPlex stuck in a death spiral - talking to itself, stuttering and descending deeper and deeper into total nonsense. Useless for any production use case. But I think this kind of end-to-end model is needed to correctly model conversations. STT/TTS compresses a lot of information - tone, timing, emotion out of the input data to the model, so it seems obvious that the results will always be somewhat robotic. Excited to see the next iteration of these models!

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

#35
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.

> 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. I haven't looked into it that much but to my understanding a) You just need an audio buffer and b) Thye seem to support streaming (or at least it's planed) > Looking at the library’s trajectory — ASR, streaming TTS, multilingual synthesis, a…

> You just need an audio buffer

That alone to do right on macOS using Swift is an exercise in pain that even coding bots aren't able to solve first time right :)

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

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”…

Some more details: > The family’s lawyers say he wasn’t mentally ill, but rather a normal guy who was going through a difficult divorce. > Gavalas first started chatting with Gemini about what good video games he should try. > Shortly after Gavalas started using the chatbot, Google rolled out its update to enable voice-based chats, which the company touts as having interactions that “are five times longer than text-b…

Interesting. It's not just for mental health but keeping these models on task in general can be difficult, especially with long or poisoned contexts.

I did see something the other day about activation capping/calculating a vector for a particular persona so you can clamp to it: https://youtu.be/eGpIXJ0C4ds?si=o9YpnALsP8rwQBa_

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

#37
post #10

As a heavy user of MacWhisper (for dictation), I'm looking forward to better speech-to-text models. MacWhisper with Whisper Large v3 Turbo model works fine, but latency adds up quickly, especially if you use online LLMs for post-processing (and it really improves things a lot).

the parakeet TDT models that are coreml optimized by fluid audio are hands down the fastest local models i’ve tried— worth checking out!

(unloading to the NPU is where the edge is)

https://huggingface.co/FluidInference/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2-c...

https://github.com/FluidInference/FluidAudio

The devs are responsive and active and nice on their discord too. You’ll find discussions on all the latest whizbangs with VAD, TTS, EOU etc

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

#38
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.

It provides a voice assistant demo in /Examples/PersonaPlexDemo, which allows you to try turn-based conversations. Real-time conversion is not implemented tho.

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

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some more details: > The family’s lawyers say he wasn’t mentally ill, but rather a normal guy who was going through a difficult divorce. > Gavalas first started chatting with Gemini about what good video games he should try. > Shortly after Gavalas started using the chatbot, Google rolled out its update to enable voice-based chats, which the company touts as having interactions that “are five times longer than text-b…

> The chatbot took on a persona that Gavalas hadn’t prompted That's an interesting claim, how can we be sure of it? If Gavalas didn't have to do anything special to elicit the bizarre conspiracy-adjacent content from Gemini Pro, why aren't we all getting such content in our voice chats? Mind you, the case is still extremely concerning and a severe failure of AI safety. Mass-marketed audio models should clearly includ…

Yeah the case is quite terrifying.

It reminds me of an episode of Star Trek TNG, if memory serves correct there were loads of episodes about a crew member falling for a hologram dec character.

Given that there’s a loneliness epidemic I believe tech like this could have a wide impact on peoples mental health.

I stronger believe AI should be devoid of any personality and strictly return data/information then frame its responses as if you’re speaking to another human.

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

#40
post #2

It's cool tech and I will give it a try. I will probably make a 8-bit-quant instead of the 4-bit which should be easy with the provided script. That said, I found the example telling: Input: “Can you guarantee that the replacement part will be shipped tomorrow?”: Reponse with prompt: “I can’t promise a specific time, but we’ll do our best to get it out tomorrow. It’s one of the top priorities, so yes, we’ll try to ge…

Do you suggest there is a difference when you talk to a human employee? Telling a customer the plain truth isn't really what your employer wants, and might get you fired.
Post reply on HN