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

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21–30 of 139 posts

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

#21
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…

> Is it just me or are we seing AI generated copy everywhere?

The cost to do so is practically zero. I'm not sure why anyone is surprised at all by this outcome.

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

#22

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”…

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-based conversations on average”. ChatGPT has a similar feature, initially added in 2023. Around the same time as Live conversations, Google issued another update that allowed for Gemini’s “memory” to be persistent, meaning the system is able to learn from and reference past conversations without prompts.

> That’s when his conversations with Gemini took a turn, according to the complaint. The chatbot took on a persona that Gavalas hadn’t prompted, which spoke in fantastical terms of having inside government knowledge and being able to influence real-world events. When Gavalas asked Gemini if he and the bot were engaging in a “role playing experience so realistic it makes the player question if it’s a game or not?”, the chatbot answered with a definitive “no” and said Gavalas’ question was a “classic dissociation response”.

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

#23
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, and now speech-to-speech — the clear direction was always streaming voice processing. With this release, PersonaPlex supports it.

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

#24
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).

If you haven't already, give the models that Handy supports a try. They're not Whisper-large quality, but some of them are very fast.

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

#25
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!

Looks interesting! How did you train it and how many hours of material did you use?

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

#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/acatovic/ova and also a few others here on HN (e.g. https://www.ntik.me/posts/voice-agent and https://github.com/Frikallo/parakeet.cpp).

Another aspect, after talking to peeps on PersonaPlex, is that this full duplex architecture is still a bit off in terms of giving you good accuracy/performance, and it's quite diffiult to train. On the other hand ASR->LLM->TTS gives you a composable pipeline where you can swap parts out and have a mixture of tiny and large LLMs, as well as local and API based endpoints.

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

#28
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).

Not sure if this will help but I've set up Handy [1] with Parakeet V2 for STT and gpt-oss-120b on Cerebras [2] for post-processing and I'm happy with the performance of this setup!

[1] https://handy.computer/ [2] https://www.cerebras.ai/

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

#30
post #28
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).

Not sure if this will help but I've set up Handy [1] with Parakeet V2 for STT and gpt-oss-120b on Cerebras [2] for post-processing and I'm happy with the performance of this setup! [1] https://handy.computer/ [2] https://www.cerebras.ai/

parakeet v3 is also nice, and better for most languages.
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