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.
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?
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.
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.”
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
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.
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.
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.
The 7B parameter Vibevoice TTS model is still the most impressive local TTS model i've tried. It was pulled by Microsoft a few days after its release due to "abuse potential" but it can be found in various community maintained huggingface repos.
I exclusively use stars as bookmarks which is why I always found it strange when people talked about lots of stars meaning high quality or trustworthy…I’ve learned since then that I’m probably in the minority (both in using stars as bookmarks and not caring about how many stars a repo has).
Stars for me are basically "this might be interesting but I don't have time to look at it now, hopefully I'll think about it later and give it a second look".
Judging by how many people apparently are paying bots to give their lazily vibe-coded repos thousands of stars, it seems like people both simultaneously take stars seriously while not taking them seriously at all. It breaks my brain.
I mean the same can be said about most versions of Windows as well. People act like Windows 11 is where it all went sour, but I've personally kind of hated it since Windows XP.
I feel like a recurring pattern with Microsoft is to create something quickly, market it aggressively and push for everyone to use it immediately, and only once it is installed everywhere do people suddenly realize how terrible it is, but it's too late to change.
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.
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.
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.
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? :)
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?
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.
Basically hallucinations are false external things, and delusions false internal things. You hallucinate a pink elephant, you delude yourself into thinking trump won 2020.
> 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.
There's a big difference between correcting some random commenter on an internet forum and correcting Microsoft.
> think it’s counterproductive. Most people only see a squabble, which makes any ensuing points from the open-source community seem silly.
Only to people that truly don't care whether something's open source. In which case, Microsoft using the term (correctly or incorrectly) won't change their perception.
But the people who do care won't like to be mislead by Microsoft. There's a reason the term is right in the headline: people respond to it.
I wish I had time to come up with a better example, but it's like if a AAA game company says they've released "native Linux build," but really they're just packaging the Windows build with Wine.
99% of people won't care, neither about the news nor the deception. But for that last 1%, any goodwill garnered with the headline would be gone, and the game company are the ones who look foolish, not the people calling them out.
To be fair, the initiators of the "Open Source" movement also co-opted a term that previously had a much more flexible meaning (and had been around for more than a decade at that point.) Just writing a document attributing specific criteria to a term does not grant one authority over the use of that term.
Ironically, the roots of the Open Source movement are a direct reponse to the Free Software movement largely because it was considered too ideological and unfriendly to corporate interests (i.e. monetization.)
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.
> “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
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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 users access to 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.
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.
The point of the Free in free software was always to protect the users of the software, not the vendors or the redistributors. (This is why the license focuses on the redistributors -- the mechanisms of the license limit their rights in order to protect others' rights.)
The first sentence of the GNU manifesto says this, and a few sections later in the document elaborate on the point:
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
By this definition almost any binary can be "open source" since hex editors exist. (Or more usefully, you can use ghidra et al. to do more interesting changes.) I know GPL has a very specific view of things, but I'd like to quote an excerpt that I think is generally applicable from https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html -
> The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.
Which is why I'm fine with "open weights", because that's saying the object code is under an open license.
> 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.
So? If the number of open source models is zero, then the number of open source models is zero.
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?
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.
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)
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.
Then it sounds like you're philosophically opposed to copyleft license like GPL. That's ok, we can agree to (in my case vehemently) disagree, but your philosophy is inconsistent with the commonly accepted definition of "open source" such as OSI's OSD[1][2]
I think you completely misunderstand me. I don’t have any opinion on that, but even in the links you shared, even OSI considers the license to be separate from the definition of open source “Open source licenses are licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition”. You can use a license that open source projects use (ie MIT), and still keep the source closed, or you can write one that puts obligations on you if you want. In fact, you can use or write pretty much any license you want if you own the copyright.
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)
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.
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!
"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
Why?
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.”
The TTS example clip in the repo of 'spontaneous singing' is creepy as fuck
Edit: I'm talking purely about speech to text (STT). Not sure about the other things this can do.
https://github.com/microsoft/VibeVoice/commit/e73d1e17c3754f...
which is microsoft for "we removed two dead links". AI innovation knows no limits!
[1] https://doublepulsar.com/microsoft-vibing-capturing-screensh...
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.
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...
I really disappointed with this model to say the least.
moving on....
I feel like a recurring pattern with Microsoft is to create something quickly, market it aggressively and push for everyone to use it immediately, and only once it is installed everywhere do people suddenly realize how terrible it is, but it's too late to change.
- 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?
https://github.com/microsoft/VibeVoice/issues/102
This ship has sailed. It’s now in the same category as hacker/cracker and the pronunciation of GIF.
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? :)
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.
Way early on (spring 2023) people tried to stop it, but no luck.
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.
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
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.
> think it’s counterproductive. Most people only see a squabble, which makes any ensuing points from the open-source community seem silly.
Only to people that truly don't care whether something's open source. In which case, Microsoft using the term (correctly or incorrectly) won't change their perception.
But the people who do care won't like to be mislead by Microsoft. There's a reason the term is right in the headline: people respond to it.
I wish I had time to come up with a better example, but it's like if a AAA game company says they've released "native Linux build," but really they're just packaging the Windows build with Wine.
99% of people won't care, neither about the news nor the deception. But for that last 1%, any goodwill garnered with the headline would be gone, and the game company are the ones who look foolish, not the people calling them out.
Ironically, the roots of the Open Source movement are a direct reponse to the Free Software movement largely because it was considered too ideological and unfriendly to corporate interests (i.e. monetization.)
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.
> “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
"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.
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.)
What in the world do you mean?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
By this definition almost any binary can be "open source" since hex editors exist. (Or more usefully, you can use ghidra et al. to do more interesting changes.) I know GPL has a very specific view of things, but I'd like to quote an excerpt that I think is generally applicable from https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html -
> The “source code” for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. “Object code” means any non-source form of a work.
Which is why I'm fine with "open weights", because that's saying the object code is under an open license.
> 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.
So? If the number of open source models is zero, then the number of open source models is zero.
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.
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.
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?
That said, I entirely agree that MS is misrepresenting their openness here, which isn’t in the least surprising.
[1]: https://opensource.org/licenses [2]: https://opensource.org/osd
Elevenlabs in the cloud.
> 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/