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Hertz-dev, the first open-source base model for conversational audio

si.inc

31–40 of 58 posts

Re: Hertz-dev, the first open-source base model for conversational audio

#31

This is really cool. FWIW, existing open-source TTS engines are really bad in comparison to what you have here: I know this is voice-to-voice, but I think there'd be a lot of appetite to get this to also be multimodal and accept text (essentially making it a really good TTS model, in addition to a great voice-to-voice model). I suppose someone could hack their way around the problem by finetuning it to essentially re…

They are a team of 4. At that size, it's better for them to be focused on one thing than stretched out

Eh, that depends. A small model that's voice-and-text is probably more useful to most people than scaling up a voice-only model: the large voice-only model will have to compete on intelligence with e.g. Qwen and Llama, since it can't be used in conjunction with them; whereas a small voice+text model can be used as a cheap frontend hiding a larger, smarter, but more expensive text-only model behind it. This is an 8b model: running it is nearly free, it can fit on a 4090 with room to spare.

On the one hand, a small team focused on voice-to-voice could probably do a lot better at voice-to-voice than a small team focused on voice-to-voice+text. But a small team focused on making the most useful model would probably do better at that goal by focusing on voice+text rather than voice-only.

Re: Hertz-dev, the first open-source base model for conversational audio

#32

Tesla’s approach to pure vision-based autonomous driving—temporarily setting aside lidar and other sensors—seems designed to make this technology more accessible and scalable. By focusing on a vision-only model, they can accelerate adoption and gather large datasets for quicker iterations. Once the vision-based system reaches a mature stage, I imagine Tesla might reintegrate additional sensor data, like lidar or rada…

I think you're describing ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode (or Realtime API) in your second paragraph.

Re: Hertz-dev, the first open-source base model for conversational audio

#33

Tesla’s approach to pure vision-based autonomous driving—temporarily setting aside lidar and other sensors—seems designed to make this technology more accessible and scalable. By focusing on a vision-only model, they can accelerate adoption and gather large datasets for quicker iterations. Once the vision-based system reaches a mature stage, I imagine Tesla might reintegrate additional sensor data, like lidar or rada…

I'm one of the devs. Our model is fully voice-to-voice, no text was involved in the making of hertz-dev for exactly this reason.

Oh, you have completed the project I planned. Currently, do you think the difficulty in improving the model lies in voice data, computing power, or algorithm optimization? I personally think that if you want to achieve the ultimate, you don’t need to remove the background sound from the original audio. Outputting audio mixed with background sound as new audio may result in background music,

If you use completely unprocessed speech data (including speech information with background music on YouTube), I think the potential will be higher, but the requirements on your computing power are too high. If you don’t have money to buy a GPU, just use voice noise reduction processing first.

Re: Hertz-dev, the first open-source base model for conversational audio

#35

That's really cool. I'm currently exploring VUI (Voice User Interface) and this might come in handy. I might be a bit biased (did my PhD exploring how VUI can persuade humans), but I think VUI is "the future" of computer interaction. If it's not the future, than at least it adds a new group of people (kids + elderly people) as potential users.

yes, there are blind people

Re: Hertz-dev, the first open-source base model for conversational audio

#38
The voice samples are speaking gibberish a lot of the time, but sonically the voices are fantastic. They sound human, even if it's nonsense syllables.

With SD and LLMs, there's a lot you can do to debug it by studying the way it responds to small changes in the prompt. But, since Hertz-dev is using sound as its input, it would be hard to discern which token you should tweak. Of course, if it's meant to be used in real time, that kind of fiddling isn't an option at all. How would you go about systematically studying Hertz-dev's behavior?

Re: Hertz-dev, the first open-source base model for conversational audio

#40
post #16

They say Hertz is first of its kind but Moshi is another duplex audio model from earlier this year that seems to perform similarly (and it runs on a MacBook): https://github.com/kyutai-labs/moshi

- LLaMA-Omni https://github.com/ictnlp/LLaMA-Omni a speech-language model built on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct for simultaneous generation of text and speech

- moshi https://github.com/kyutai-labs/moshi speech-text foundation model using Mimi, a SOTA streaming neural audio codec

- Mini-Omni https://github.com/gpt-omni/mini-omni multimodal LLM based on Qwen2 offering speech input and output

- Ichigo https://github.com/homebrewltd/ichigo open research project extending a text-based LLM to have native listening ability, using an early fusion technique

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