If you're doing a home lab voice assistant 1B is nice, because on a 12gb gpu you can run a moderately competent 7b LLM and two 1b models; 1 for speech to text and also text to speech, plus some for the wake word monitor. Maybe in a couple of years we can combine all this into a single ~8b model that runs efficiently on 12gb gpu. Nvidia doesn't seem very incentivized right now to sell consumer GPUs that can run all this on a single consumer grade chip when they're making so much money selling commercial grade 48gb cards.

> Interesting that there isn't a mention of Orpheus as prior art either

Llasa-3b (https://huggingface.co/HKUSTAudio/Llasa-3B) came out before Orpheus (https://huggingface.co/canopylabs/orpheus-3b-0.1-ft).

> it's the exact same thing.

They're very similar, but they're not the exact same thing.

Llasa uses xcodec2, a much simpler, lossless 16khz wav codec. This makes it superior for one-shot voice cloning.

Orpheus' 24khz snac codec is lossy which makes it difficult to use for zero-shot cloning as the reference audio gets degraded during tokenization. You can test this here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Gapeleon/snac_test

But when finetuned on 50+ audio samples, it produces much cleaner 24khz audio than Llasa, and the snac model is much easier to run on consumer hardware than xcodec2 (87t/s for realtime speech, which can be achieved on an RTX3080 for example)