frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Llasa: Llama-Based Speech Synthesis

https://llasatts.github.io/llasatts/
168•CalmStorm•10mo ago

Comments

CalmStorm•10mo ago
LLaSA is a simple framework for speech synthesis that employs a single-layer vector quantizer (VQ) codec and a single Transformer architecture to fully align with standard LLMs such as LLaMA.
WastedCucumber•10mo ago
Probably the title should have the correct capitalization then. Cause I was fully expecting a speech synthesis tool that sounded like llamas talking human language and now I'm bummed out!
StevenNunez•10mo ago
I can't wait see this integrated into Open WebUI! These sound amazing.
gapeleon•10mo ago
You can run an openai-compatible endpoint and point open-webui at it if you want this. I had to add a function to filter out markdown lists, code, etc as the model was choking on them.
mring33621•10mo ago
the long 'uuuuhhhhhhh' from some of the lesser models is killing me.
jszymborski•10mo ago
based on the samples, it really seams like anything smaller than 3B is pretty useless.
hadlock•10mo ago
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.
Dlemo•10mo ago
Hui for the activation word?

Shouldn't there be some hardware module be available similar to how Alexa, Siri and Google do it?

Whith a ring buffer detection the word without recording everything?

gapeleon•10mo ago
This finetune seems pretty stable (1b llasa) https://huggingface.co/spaces/HKUST-Audio/Llasa-1B-multi-spe...

1B is actually huge for a TTS model. Here's an 82m model with probably the most stable/coherent output of all the open weights tts models I've tested: https://huggingface.co/spaces/hexgrad/Kokoro-TTS

But if you mean zero-shot cloning, yeah they all seem to have those slurred speech artefacts from time to time.

nialv7•10mo ago
the mispronunciation of 行 and 行 in the Chinese sample is killing me too XD
dheera•10mo ago
> employs a single-layer vector quantizer (VQ) codec and a single Transformer architecture to fully align

I really wish when new models were released that they would draw a diagram of all the layers and the tensor input and output sizes at each layer, with zoom in/out capabilities if needed using D3.js or whatever visualization framework if needed. Every single layer should be on there with its input and output sizes.

These one-sentence descriptions, and approximate block diagrams with arrows pointing at each other are never enough to understand how something is actually implemented.

exe34•10mo ago
Sounds like a solid SaaS business plan!
dr_kiszonka•10mo ago
That might be intentional.
imtringued•10mo ago
This already exists in Transformer Lab and ONNX (not recommended for transformers).

You can also build a custom version of llama.cpp that writes out the ggml compute graph. What's irritating is that hugging face didn't add it to their GGUF file viewer.

dheera•10mo ago
Oh, sure, for the well-known models that are already on there.

I just wish that new research would always spell it out in full instead of these silly block diagrams labelled with just e.g. "Cross Attention" and not the exact parameters, number of heads, layer sizes, etc.

Also some of these diagrams use a + for concatenation and some use it for addition, that's another headache to figure out, having layer sizes would make it clear.

ks2048•10mo ago
Odd that the page doesn't seem to link to either,

paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04128

github: https://github.com/zhenye234/LLaSA_training

thot_experiment•10mo ago
Interesting that there isn't a mention of Orpheus as prior art either since it's the exact same thing.

(https://github.com/canopyai/Orpheus-TTS)

gapeleon•10mo ago
> 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)

oezi•10mo ago
Do you happen to know why Orpheus and Llasa use Finetuning for voice cloning?

Zonos uses 128-float embeddings for voices and it seems so much nicer. Because you can just mix and match voices without changing the model.

thot_experiment•10mo ago
No, you just condition it with text-voice token pairs and then when conditioning further inference w/ text the voice tokens tend to match the pairs further up in the context.
oezi•10mo ago
Isn't xcodec2 also lossy? I thought it is also just another neural codec (50 tok/s, single codebook).

What are people using to upsampling back to 44,1 or 48 khz? Anything fancy?

woodson•10mo ago
They’re both lossy. They use a VAE-VQ type architecture trained with a combination of losses/discriminators. The differences are mainly the encoder/decoder architecture, the type of bottleneck quantization (RVQ, FSQ, etc.) and of course the training data.

Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns

https://www.svd.se/a/K8nrV4/metas-ai-smart-glasses-and-data-privacy-concerns-workers-say-we-see-e...
1041•sandbach•10h ago•590 comments

Arm's Cortex X925: Reaching Desktop Performance

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arms-cortex-x925-reaching-desktop
42•ingve•1h ago•1 comments

British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-adopting-year-round-daylight-time-9.7111657
782•ireflect•12h ago•391 comments

Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ars-technica-fires-reporter-ai-quotes
253•danso•7h ago•153 comments

Simple screw counter

https://mitxela.com/projects/screwcounter
120•jk_tech•2d ago•30 comments

I built a pint-sized Macintosh

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/pint-sized-macintosh-pico-micro-mac/
24•ingve•1h ago•6 comments

Show HN: I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch

https://www.ntik.me/posts/voice-agent
387•nicktikhonov•11h ago•110 comments

Buckle Up for Bumpier Skies

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/09/buckle-up-for-bumpier-skies
30•littlexsparkee•3h ago•7 comments

DOS Memory Management

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/dos-memory-management/
40•ingve•2d ago•1 comments

New iPad Air, powered by M4

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-the-new-ipad-air-powered-by-m4/
387•Garbage•18h ago•609 comments

Physicists developing a quantum computer that’s entirely open source

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v19/24
96•tzury•9h ago•22 comments

First in-utero stem cell therapy for fetal spina bifida repair is safe: study

https://health.ucdavis.edu/news/headlines/first-ever-in-utero-stem-cell-therapy-for-fetal-spina-b...
295•gmays•18h ago•51 comments

Guilty Displeasures

https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/what-are-your-guilty-displeasures
63•aregue•2d ago•65 comments

Launch HN: OctaPulse (YC W26) – Robotics and computer vision for fish farming

99•rohxnsxngh•16h ago•34 comments

Seed of Might Color Correction Process (2023) [pdf]

https://andrewvanner.github.io/som/SoM_CC_Process_Day.pdf
86•haunter•10h ago•21 comments

Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS

https://motorolanews.com/motorola-three-new-b2b-solutions-at-mwc-2026/
2184•km•1d ago•799 comments

Elevated Errors in Claude.ai

https://status.claude.com/incidents/yf48hzysrvl5
109•LostMyLogin•5h ago•98 comments

iPhone 17e

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/03/apple-introduces-iphone-17e/
266•meetpateltech•19h ago•385 comments

We Built a Video Rendering Engine by Lying to the Browser About What Time It Is

https://blog.replit.com/browsers-dont-want-to-be-cameras
4•darshkpatel•2d ago•0 comments

The Cathode Ray Tube site

https://www.crtsite.com/didactic-crt.html
45•joebig•1d ago•6 comments

Show HN: Govbase – Follow a bill from source text to news bias to social posts

https://govbase.com
190•foxfoxx•15h ago•76 comments

Guido van Rossum Interviews Thomas Wouters (Python Core Dev)

https://gvanrossum.github.io/interviews/Thomas.html
28•azhenley•1d ago•1 comments

Daily Driving GrapheneOS

https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/8-4-months-of-daily-driving-grapheneos/
92•zdw•3h ago•83 comments

Inside the M4 Apple Neural Engine, Part 1: Reverse Engineering

https://maderix.substack.com/p/inside-the-m4-apple-neural-engine
330•zdw•1d ago•95 comments

RCade: Building a Community Arcade Cabinet

https://www.frankchiarulli.com/blog/building-the-rcade/
82•evakhoury•4d ago•14 comments

Against Query Based Compilers

https://matklad.github.io/2026/02/25/against-query-based-compilers.html
61•surprisetalk•1d ago•34 comments

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2026)

209•whoishiring•17h ago•246 comments

The 185-Microsecond Type Hint

https://blog.sturdystatistics.com/posts/type_hint/
67•kianN•10h ago•8 comments

Programmable Cryptography (2024)

https://0xparc.org/writings/programmable-cryptography-1
69•fi-le•2d ago•40 comments

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)

98•whoishiring•17h ago•228 comments