This is a very good model, but can it be run on the web?

This is not a new model. Also, it hallucinates a lot. Also, it's very heavy and slow in inference. It's also bad in multilingual.

Edit: I'm talking purely about speech to text (STT). Not sure about the other things this can do.

• zuzululu

  today at 4:36 PM

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

  moving on....

• scotty79

  today at 3:11 PM

  You just saved me an afternoon.

• lblock

  today at 1:14 PM

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

  • xnx

    today at 2:46 PM

    Simonw (who has a bit of a Midas touch for posts here) just posted about it https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/vibevoice/

    • realty_geek

      today at 3:36 PM

      To be fair, his Midas touch is a result of consistency and a lot of hard work.

      It's like the gardener at one of the Oxford colleges said - it's really easy to create these perfect lawns, just turn up every day and trim and water it - for a couple hundred years.

  • GuinansEyebrows

    today at 3:05 PM

    there is so much more subversive marketing out there than any of us can really fathom. i try not to be too paranoid but it's getting a lot harder every day.

    i know someone who worked in what we might call the 'astroturfing' space within the entertainment industry. after having a few discussions with him and with things like this[0] becoming more known, it's really difficult to afford any assumption of organic intent when money is on the line - especially at the scale that microsoft works at compared to something as comparatively quaint as the music industry.

    [0] https://www.wired.com/story/geese-chaotic-good-marketing-ind...

  • ramon156

    today at 1:24 PM

    well duh, they updated the news section

    https://github.com/microsoft/VibeVoice/commit/e73d1e17c3754f...

    which is microsoft for "we removed two dead links". AI innovation knows no limits!

    • Vinnl

      today at 2:30 PM

      Interestingly that seems to be in response to [1], which might indeed be the trigger for this.

      [1] https://doublepulsar.com/microsoft-vibing-capturing-screensh...

• gagan2020

  today at 3:05 PM

  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.

• SecretDreams

  today at 1:21 PM

  I think this was all covered when they said it was released by Microsoft?

  • NobleLie

    today at 2:08 PM

    The nuance is lost on LLM agentic dominant partakers.

I think in this category, Voxtral by Mistral is a lot better. It also happens to be small enough to run on webGPU https://huggingface.co/spaces/mistralai/Voxtral-Realtime-Web...

I think we should stop calling this type of models open source. They are indeed "open weight." The training code is proprietary and never revealed.

https://github.com/microsoft/VibeVoice/issues/102

• simonw

  today at 2:54 PM

  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".

  • yjftsjthsd-h

    today at 3:00 PM

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

    Yes, the first of which is that you should be able to build it from source. Which requires the source code, and in this case data.

    • simonw

      today at 3:23 PM

      The OSI's take on this is that an open source model can be modified through fine-tuning etc, even if you can't rebuild it from scratch.

      The problem with requiring "build from scratch" for open source models is that the number of interesting models with training data that can be openly licensed is close to zero.

      If you trained your model on an unlicensed scrape of the web you can't release the data under an open source license!

      The Open Source Initiative have a bunch of their thinking around this in their FAQ for the "Open Source AI definition": https://opensource.org/ai/faq#isn-t-training-data-required-t...

      • riedel

        today at 3:42 PM

        I would personally disagree slightly with this take. Freely being able to use means IMHO, that this can be done for all applications in a legal (and ideally ethical) fashion. Regulation often requires to prove the quality or provenance of data. Open source has IMHO often a very libertarian view on things focusing on the rights of the user an not society in general.

    • rogerrogerr

      today at 3:24 PM

      They’ll never reveal the data, because that would reveal this is all built on stolen work.

      • simonw

        today at 3:40 PM

        Some of the models DO reveal the data, and it's still built on "stolen work" in that it's unlicensed scrapes of the Web. Here's an example:

        https://huggingface.co/allenai/OLMo-2-0325-32B

        Here's one of their training mixes: https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/dolma3_pool - which includes 8 trillion tokens from Common Crawl.

  • data-ottawa

    today at 3:12 PM

    That would be “permissive license”

    Maybe we should have a little cue card for models: vendor/name, size, open weights, open source, permissive license.

    It’s simple enough an idea.

• jcmfernandes

  today at 1:59 PM

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

  • MarsIronPI

    today at 2:15 PM

    If you're going to apologize to Stallman, you should apologize for conflating open source with software freedom. ;D

    • jcmfernandes

      today at 2:56 PM

      I totally get you, but this is yet another thick layer away.

    • psychoslave

      today at 2:33 PM

      With free libre software, where freedom and liberty are about what the end user is empowered with actually, the software is mostly metonymic. Free software, free society, because there are free people in the middle of course.

      • jrm4

        today at 2:37 PM

        Right, as I said elsewhere, maybe let's just let "open-source" have it.

        "Open-source" can be "anything you can go out and grab a copy of and use" but doesn't give you much legal certainty about any of it, and reserve "free software" for the other, better thing.

        • hedora

          today at 3:02 PM

          But, free software lost it's way around GPLv3. From the end user's perspective, GPLv3 says that you can only use the software if it's either a cloud service, on hypothetical open firmware devices, or if you install it yourself.

          AGPLv3 partially solves the issue by blocking people like Google from using it to build proprietary cloud services that take away their users' freedom. (It still doesn't solve the problem where providers use network effects to achieve the same end game.)

          • MarsIronPI

            today at 3:07 PM

            > From the end user's perspective, GPLv3 says that you can only use the software if it's either a cloud service, on hypothetical open firmware devices, or if you install it yourself.

            What in the world do you mean?

            • hedora

              today at 4:41 PM

              The anti-tivo clause bans things like Apple pre-installing GPLv3 software on macs, but allows them to let you use exactly the same software as long as they do not give you the binary. AGPLv3 blocks both use cases, GPLv2 blocks neither.

              On the spectrum of "things that take away user freedom", withholding the source code is bad. Withholding the source code, the binaries and physical access to the computer is obviously much worse! This latter business model is heavily subsidized by GPLv3.

          • jrm4

            today at 4:09 PM

            I don't understand this either. The GPL doesn't address end users and their use of software at all, to be technical. It only addresses what terms of copyright redistributors of GPLed software are allowed to apply in-turn to subsequent end users.

            • hedora

              today at 4:33 PM

              The point of the Free in free software was always to protect the users of the software, not the vendors or the redistributors.

              The first sentence of the GNU manifesto says this, and a few sections later in the document elaborate on the point:

              https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html

              Note, in particular, footnote [1] which explains that its OK for distributors to ask for payment, but that it's never OK for users to have to ask for permission to use the software, and the section "Why I Must Write GNU".

              Since then, software service monopolies became common, and all of the most end-user-hostile systems on earth rely heavily on the GNU system. At this point, we're paying for permission to use those services with our money, our data, our democracy, etc.

              I certainly cannot give you permission to use any of the GPLed services that I have used, or that I've been paid to extend. Therefore, I say the free software movement has lost its way.

• WhyNotHugo

  today at 3:35 PM

  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.

  • freedomben

    today at 3:50 PM

    In their defense, most everyone else does the same thing. They still shouldn't do it, but at least they're not the trendsetter here (though they are contributing to the ongoing problem)

  • Otek

    today at 3:49 PM

    ? Do you know what “source” means in open source? Like, what is the source of the binary? It’s the code. That’s the source in open source.

    • freedomben

      today at 3:53 PM

      I don't disagree, but it is perfectly acceptable per the MIT license, which is an OSI approved license. MIT doesn't require source distribution with the binary (which is why from the developer perspective, it's a more "permissive" license)

      • clickety_clack

        today at 4:04 PM

        The license describes what users are allowed to do with the source code, it doesn’t (and shouldn’t) define what a creator has to do to make the source code open.

• JumpCrisscross

  today at 1:20 PM

  > 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.

  • engeljohnb

    today at 4:16 PM

    The inventor of GIF didn't begin with a document* clearly laying out what is and isn't to be called a "GIF."

    I think it's right to push back whenever a huge tech corporation tries to build goodwill by falsely using terms like "open source."

    *https://opensource.org/osd

    • JumpCrisscross

      today at 4:34 PM

      > inventor of GIF didn't begin with a document clearly laying out what is and isn't to be called a "GIF”*

      Neither did the inventors of AI. A third party published a document after corporations went with open weights = open source and a spoiler block in FOSS wanted all training data published.

      > it's right to push back whenever a huge tech corporation tries to build goodwill by falsely using terms like "open source

      I think it’s counterproductive. Most people only see a squabble, which makes any ensuing points from the open-source community seem silly. Those who care can continue using the more-precise language they choose to.

      Put another way, there is a difference between using terms like cracker and fully spelling out cryptocurrency, and telling people who use hacker and crypto more loosely that they’re wrong. They aren’t wrong and that isn’t meaningful feedback. At the same time, the person using the precise language isn’t wrong either.

  • andy_ppp

    today at 1:21 PM

    I think you mean GIF.

  • giancarlostoro

    today at 1:33 PM

    It's the same as GIS, you wouldn't say jizz now would you?

    • DoctorOW

      today at 1:48 PM

      I absolutely do, every single time it comes up.

    • kevin_thibedeau

      today at 1:55 PM

      The developer of the format declared the pronunciation 30+ years ago. It has always been jif.

      • Geezus_42

        today at 2:14 PM

        Yeah, but society overruled them.

    • ziml77

      today at 2:33 PM

      I hadn't thought about how to pronounce GIS, but do you have a problem with the pronunciation of the Japanese Industrial Standards: JIS?

      • s20n

        today at 2:58 PM

        I've been pronouncing both of them as /dʒis/ like hiss and not /dʒɪz/. I however am not a native english speaker of English. I wonder if native speakers gravitate towards the z more?

        • ziml77

          today at 3:52 PM

          I would end both with the S sound, but I'm operating under the assumption that the person I was replying to either pronounces their Ss as Zs or can't tell the difference between the S and Z sounds.

          Because the other assumption I could have gone with is the less charitable take that they know GIS with a soft G doesn't sound like jizz, but they were just looking for a crude way to mock the soft G.

        • bronson

          today at 3:45 PM

          I think it depends on region. Related, many speakers pronounce chips and salza, Tezla, Wezley.

    • dijksterhuis

      today at 2:07 PM

      i am absolutely going to from now on

    • notabotiswear

      today at 1:40 PM

      I take it that you haven’t met the Arcgees people…

    • pardon_me

      today at 2:02 PM

      How do you pronounce giraffe?

      • giancarlostoro

        today at 2:50 PM

        Same way I pronounce my first name btw ;) but I think of "gif" as "gift" and this is probably the subconscious association people make without realizing it.

        • WorldMaker

          today at 3:33 PM

          Which is why I find it fun to bring up that in Old English "gift" hadn't yet picked up the "t" and was spelled "gif", but in Old English "g" was most commonly "HY". I like the Old English pronunciation of "gif" as "HYEEF", which is a "compromise" position that often makes some of both soft-g and hard-g "gif" pronunciation fans angry.

          • giancarlostoro

            today at 4:02 PM

            I sometimes just pick the opposite of whatever everyone agreed to just for fun. I do the same when people cry about vim or emacs since I have used both. ;)

            Some men just want to watch the world burn. At least it's mostly harmless fun anyway. It's even funnier when they bring up how my name is pronounced in defense of "jiff" and I tell them, so you're calling me the expert in "Gi" pronunciation then? :)

          • ziml77

            today at 3:54 PM

            I have never heard this third option before but I love it!

      • parineum

        today at 2:06 PM

        How do you pronounce gift?

      • briffle

        today at 2:39 PM

        gorge = george

  • WarmWash

    today at 1:48 PM

    And "hallucination" which should have been "delusion".

    Way early on (spring 2023) people tried to stop it, but no luck.

    • MagicMoonlight

      today at 2:49 PM

      Why would it be delusion? It’s making something up which isn’t there and describing it.

      • WarmWash

        today at 2:52 PM

        A hallucination is a false sensory experience.

        A delusion is a false mental belief.

        Basically hallucinations are false external things, and delusions false internal things. You hallucinate a pink elephant, you delude yourself into thinking trump won 2020.

• btown

  today at 2:18 PM

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

  • cute_boi

    today at 3:46 PM

    what is problem with restrictive licensing? Most of them starts if you have 1M users etc?

• bitvvip

  today at 2:39 PM

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

• giancarlostoro

  today at 1:33 PM

  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.

• scotty79

  today at 3:08 PM

  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?

• jrm4

  today at 2:35 PM

  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.

• ilqr_jb

  today at 4:08 PM

  [dead]

• today at 4:12 PM

• notabotiswear

  today at 1:44 PM

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

  • dist-epoch

    today at 1:52 PM

    it was replaced with abundancewashing

    • Geezus_42

      today at 2:16 PM

      What is "abundancewashing"?

      • dist-epoch

        today at 2:30 PM

        > “This means a future of abundance. A future where there is no poverty, where people can have whatever they want in terms of goods and services.” – Elon Musk

        > “I think we see a path now where the world gets much more abundant and much better every year.” – Sam Altman

        https://www.diamandis.com/blog/elon-sam-abundance

Shouldn't it be called something like "Copilot Voice"?

Interesting to see "vibe" enshrined by the likes of Microsoft as an AI product word.

• amlib

  today at 4:22 PM

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

• accrual

  today at 1:37 PM

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

  • ryandrake

    today at 3:16 PM

    In my mind, Vibe-anything means "some slop carelessly thrown together to ship as fast as possible." Wild that it's being used in a serious product name!

  • Barbing

    today at 2:00 PM

    I’m just surprised they put the name of the e-waste slop company in their product

• lvncelot

  today at 4:09 PM

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

• altmanaltman

  today at 1:49 PM

  Which makes it even more weird they get offended when people use Mircoslop. They are the ones leaning into the marketing

  • Vinnl

    today at 2:31 PM

    "get offended" is just what the clickbait news cycle made of it. It was based on the post at [1], and this is all it said:

    > We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our “theory of the mind” that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other

    [1] https://snscratchpad.com/posts/looking-ahead-2026/

    • fg137

      today at 3:57 PM

      Are you sure you have the correct reference?

      I think everyone else is relating to

      https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-bans-...

    • altmanaltman

      today at 2:48 PM

      When a CEO says "We need to get beyond the arguments of X" it is universally a polite, PR-scrubbed way of saying, "Please stop talking about X, it is hurting our business" which is how the media interpreted it.

Isn't this project the one Microsoft published but then soon after pulled it for security/safety reasons? What has changed since then?

• 542458

  today at 12:55 PM

  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.

  • SingleSourceAI

    today at 1:03 PM

    [dead]

• infecto

  today at 1:47 PM

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

  • Barbing

    today at 2:13 PM

    [off topic]

    When explanations get posted directly in HN comments, I imagine someone somewhere in the world is able to learn in spite of their Internet restrictions/firewalls

    People will also post their own interpretations in response to comments, and quickly find out they missed something.

    … But if you try to automate it, like include a summary under every HN post, you encourage laziness too much and are pre-chewing too heavily. Some balance here.

    [on topic]

    (OK I’m done making excuses, time to read the article… thanks for the encouragement!)

    I thought this was not explained in the readme directly but in fact I missed it. I wasn’t going to read Microsoft entire changelog! But it was substantive, thanks to sibling commenter:

    “2025-09-05: VibeVoice is an open-source research framework intended to advance collaboration in the speech synthesis community. After release, we discovered instances where the tool was used in ways inconsistent with the stated intent. Since responsible use of AI is one of Microsoft’s guiding principles, we have removed the VibeVoice-TTS code from this repository.”

I've been using VibeVoice's ASR (speech to text) model quite intensively for the past month and have found it to be a lot more reliable and out-of-the box functional then Whisper, parakeet and other models. The fact that is has diarization built into to the model is a huge win in my book. Without that you have to run a different model just for that which adds significantly to the overall processing time vs VibeVoice which gives you reliably great results. Big fan.

Still waiting for the open weights model that conclusively beats the multi-year old Whisper in accuracy, features, and performance.

• scotty79

  today at 3:13 PM

  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.

Interesting story about this repo/product/author by cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116454846703138243

• today at 2:56 PM

Great post last night from Simon: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/vibevoice/

• 542458

  today at 12:53 PM

  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.

• JumpCrisscross

  today at 1:23 PM

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

  Why?

Microsoft Store App Vibing.exe Accused of Harvesting Screens, Audio, and Clipboard Data:

https://cyberpress.org/microsoft-store-app-vibing-exe-accuse...

So we've really just settled on Vibe as the verb for AI then?

• giarc

  today at 12:53 PM

  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?

  • internet_points

    today at 1:21 PM

    it'll probably be something we're not even talking about yet - we still have 7 months in which to make the world even worse

• pryanshu89

  today at 12:51 PM

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

Holy moly, a Microsoft AI product that isn't named Copilot!

• DoctorOW

  today at 1:49 PM

  Missed opportunity to call it Vopilot

  • silverwind

    today at 2:55 PM

    Slopilot

You have selected Microsoft Sam as the computer's default voice.

• accrual

  today at 1:38 PM

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

It would have been better if they provided not just weights, but also some frontend where it is usable as is.

I took a look into local options for ASR and diarization some months ago, I missed that VibeVoice now has this feature.

My conclusions back then (which only came from a shallow research on the topic and 0 real experience mind you) was that Whisper + Pyannote was the "stable" approach.

Have the VibeVoice, Voxtral, Qwen or the Nemo solutions caught up in segmentation and speaker recognition?

Microsoft has historically made poor choices in product naming, but this has to be a new low.

I the past month or so, I added 2 models to my app Whisper Memos (https://whispermemos.com):

- Cohere Transcribe (self hosted)

- Grok Speech To Text (they provide an API, only $0.10/hr!)

They are both excellent. I'm not sure about this one. Would you like to see it in a consumer speech to text app?

• olejorgenb

  today at 1:19 PM

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

• Barbing

  today at 1:58 PM

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

• 2ndorderthought

  today at 1:21 PM

  Have you tried qwen?

• SecretDreams

  today at 1:22 PM

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

  • jayphen

    today at 2:01 PM

    Voxtral competes on price ($0.003/min) and quality. Speechmatics has best in class accuracy but is a bit more expensive ($0.004/min)

  • Void_

    today at 1:29 PM

    Our default is still OpenAI Whisper. Grok is just a choice for users who might prefer it.

What’s the current state of the art, for each of training locally and in the cloud, for learning my voice?

• yreg

  today at 2:02 PM

  Locally maybe https://voicebox.sh/

  Elevenlabs in the cloud.

• chrsw

  today at 1:36 PM

  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.

• khimaros

  today at 2:11 PM

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

Maybe Microsoft’s real strength was never making the best model, it was knowing you don’t need to, as long as you own the platform everyone builds on.

looks like this offers ASR support in GGUF https://github.com/CrispStrobe/CrispASR -- haven't tested

For me its giving me very poor results

English only?

Previously:

Sept 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45114245

• simonw

  today at 2:58 PM

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

Seems quite heavy for a STT model, Parakeet and Whisper are much smaller and perform great for quick dictation and transcription of longer files. I guess that's due to additional accuracy and speaker diarisation?

The TTS example clip in the repo of 'spontaneous singing' is creepy as fuck

Microsoft is famous for choosing terrible names but how could they be this terrible.

lol they rug-pulled the 7B for our own safety some months ago