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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

For me its giving me very poor results