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It has some perks, is a bit more expressive in some cases, but overall is trained on really noisy data, uses more memory, and isn't that fast - I'm talking about the (7b?) version that they released then removed quickly (vibevoice-community on github) - I still use chatterbox turbo and sometimes qwen TTS.

Yeah, I don't get why it is suddenly getting so much attention today, it is all over twitter too

It is not good for text to speech (TTS) as well. I am trying it for few days. First of all 1.5B model documentation is not there. 0.5B realtime is shit model. I was converting text, line by line and it was randomly adding music and couldn't handle special characters like "…".

I really disappointed with this model to say the least.

Yes, the SOTA is currently much more advanced.

you saved us a lot of time here.... i unstarred the repo

moving on....

Saved a lot of my time thanks!

I'm shocked, shocked to find that Microsoft takes credit for a slow, unoriginal product that doesn't actually do what it advertises.

You just saved me an afternoon.

Indeed. We now live in a world where freeware is named open source. We are very sorry, Stallman.

I'm reserving that complaint for "open source" models which are released under non-open-source licenses.

I care that I know what I can DO with the project when I see it described as "open source".

> we should stop calling this type of model open source. They are indeed "open weight”

This ship has sailed. It’s now in the same category as hacker/cracker and the pronunciation of GIF.

Devils advocate here: I can give you a binary of my open source MIT code and never phone you the code. The code is still MIT licensed, and open source. You just have no access to it.

That said, I entirely agree that MS is misrepresenting their openness here, which isn’t in the least surprising.

At least it's MIT licensed! As much as non-open training data irks me, restrictive licensing irks me more!

What you said makes a lot of sense. Free software should not be confused with open source

I mean, you have "AI" which means just about anything in marketing speak, "Agentic" is kind of becoming similar, hopefully they don't goof that one too badly, would be nice to know what you are trying to sell me. Used to be "Cloud" meant storage not just hosting (I guess it still does).

Then there's "Smart" in front of Car, Phone, TV, and so on... Meaning different things.

I do think "Open Weight" should be more commonly used. There's definitely communities that spring up that build the training infrastructure and inference infrastructure around open models on the other hand.

Open weights is not exactly right either because we do get source of the software that uses those open weights.

Maybe open inference?

But we often also get source code for fine tunning the model.

So maybe it's closer to open source than to anything else?

Isn't it a bit like not calling a game open source because engine tooling used to made it isn't open source and they didn't publish .psd files with asset designs?

I'm genuinely torn on this one; I get technically why not, but why I think I have no problem with it is the wishy-washiness of "open source" generally.

As I teach this stuff to people newer to this tech, it's probably just easier and more helpful to refer to the wide array of "stuff you can just download and use yourself" as "open-source" and then after that, go deeper and talk about why Stallman was right, how "Free Software" was first. etc.

Openwashing is the new greenwashing, which, coincidently, seems to have gone out of fashion a few hundred datacentres ago.

got to love how they're trying to hide the links.

Look at the "News" section in the readme - The original TTS model is gone from this repo (you can still find it other places), but the SST/ASR, long form TTS, and streaming TTS models are newer.

It’s confusing (at least for me) because the project covers a number of things including what you are mentioning.

Especially when "vibe coded" can have a negative connotation meaning quickly put together without understanding.

Maybe they were trying to make a pun on "Via Voice", the cursed IBM STT from the 90s?

I'm honestly more surprised that they could resist the temptation to call it Copilot

Note that this just covers the Speech-to-Text/Speech-Recognition aspect (a-la whisper), there's also models for long-form Text-To-Speech and steaming Text-To-Speech.

“VibeVoice can only handle up to an hour of audio”

Why?

My friends and I had fun in the computer lab with Microsoft Sam, inputting long strings of characters to create funny sound effects. Sususususususu.

Missed opportunity to call it Vopilot

I'd be willing to bet it will be "Word of the Year" for 2026. Merriam-Webster had 'slop' for 2025, and 'polarization' for 2024. Is there a prediction market for this?

Why use precise technical language when you can just vibe with your AI system?

It's crazy that a lot is happening in open models for stt, but there's very little progress when it comes to results, esp multilingual.

It highly depends on the sort of data you’re processing (phone calls, podcasts, meetings of more people recorded using single channel?). For NVIDIA/NeMo, check out their softformer diarization models (also streaming).

I've had good experiences with the Mistral Voxtral models (I've used the API, but some of the model-variants are open weight)

Does Cohere work with longer transcripts? Do you have to do some magic to merge recordings over 35 seconds long?

Have you tried qwen?

Any non-Musk alternatives that are comparable in quality and cost?

Locally maybe https://voicebox.sh/

Elevenlabs in the cloud.

Local? No idea. Cloud? Eleven Labs, probably. But it's described as "cloning" not "training". Not sure what the distinction is or why it matters if the end result is you can to generate any TTS that sounds like you. There might very well be an important one, I just don't know it.

open weights i would say S2: https://github.com/rodrigomatta/s2.cpp

That's not confusing enough. It should be just Copilot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_AP3SGMxxM

That was about the text-to-speech model, the speech-to-text one was release in January.