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.<p>Edit: I'm talking purely about speech to text (STT). Not sure about the other things this can do.
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.
Yeah, I don't get why it is suddenly getting so much attention today, it is all over twitter too
Simonw (who has a bit of a Midas touch for posts here) just posted about it <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/vibevoice/" rel="nofollow">https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/vibevoice/</a>
To be fair, his Midas touch is a result of consistency and a lot of hard work.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/geese-chaotic-good-marketing-industry-plant/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/geese-chaotic-good-marketing-ind...</a>
well duh, they updated the news section<p><a href="https://github.com/microsoft/VibeVoice/commit/e73d1e17c3754f046352014856a922f8208fb5d3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/VibeVoice/commit/e73d1e17c3754f...</a><p>which is microsoft for "we removed two dead links". AI innovation knows no limits!
Interestingly that seems to be in response to [1], which might indeed be the trigger for this.<p>[1] <a href="https://doublepulsar.com/microsoft-vibing-capturing-screenshots-and-voice-samples-without-governance-6973c48f03a7" rel="nofollow">https://doublepulsar.com/microsoft-vibing-capturing-screensh...</a>
Saved a lot of my time thanks!
you saved us a lot of time here.... i unstarred the repo<p>moving on....
Yes, the SOTA is currently much more advanced.
You just saved me an afternoon.
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 "…".<p>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.
yep, it seems this was trained on large amount of podcasts with ad jingles or phone call queues with elevator music. I was also pretty disappointed to run the TTS last week.
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I'm shocked, shocked to find that Microsoft takes credit for a slow, unoriginal product that doesn't actually do what it advertises.
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.<p><a href="https://github.com/microsoft/VibeVoice/issues/102" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/VibeVoice/issues/102</a>
Indeed. We now live in a world where freeware is named open source. We are very sorry, Stallman.
I'm reserving that complaint for "open source" models which are released under non-open-source licenses.<p>I care that I know what I can DO with the project when I see it described as "open source".
> I care that I know what I can DO with the project when I see it described as "open source".<p>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 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.<p>The problem with requiring "build from scratch" for open source models is that the number of interesting models with training data that <i>can</i> be openly licensed is close to zero.<p>If you trained your model on an unlicensed scrape of the web you can't release the data under an open source license!<p>The Open Source Initiative have a bunch of their thinking around this in their FAQ for the "Open Source AI definition": <a href="https://opensource.org/ai/faq#isn-t-training-data-required-to-program-the-ai-system" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.org/ai/faq#isn-t-training-data-required-t...</a>
> 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.<p>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 <i>is</i> generally applicable from <a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html</a> -<p>> 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.<p>Which is why I'm fine with "open weights", because that's saying the object code is under an open license.<p>> 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.<p>So? If the number of open source models is zero, then the number of open source models is zero.
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.
They’ll never reveal the data, because that would reveal this is all built on stolen work.
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:<p><a href="https://huggingface.co/allenai/OLMo-2-0325-32B" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/allenai/OLMo-2-0325-32B</a><p>Here's one of their training mixes: <a href="https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/dolma3_pool" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/dolma3_pool</a> - which includes 8 trillion tokens from Common Crawl.
That would be “permissive license”<p>Maybe we should have a little cue card for models: vendor/name, size, open weights, open source, permissive license.<p>It’s simple enough an idea.
> <i>we should stop calling this type of model open source. They are indeed "open weight”</i><p>This ship has sailed. It’s now in the same category as hacker/cracker and the pronunciation of GIF.
I think you mean <i>GIF</i>.
The inventor of GIF didn't begin with a document* clearly laying out what is and isn't to be called a "GIF."<p>I think it's right to push back whenever a huge tech corporation tries to build goodwill by falsely using terms like "open source."<p>*<a href="https://opensource.org/osd" rel="nofollow">https://opensource.org/osd</a>
> <i>inventor of GIF didn't begin with a document</i> clearly laying out what is and isn't to be called a "GIF”*<p>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.<p>> <i>it's right to push back whenever a huge tech corporation tries to build goodwill by falsely using terms like "open source</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>> think it’s counterproductive. Most people only see a squabble, which makes any ensuing points from the open-source community seem silly.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.)
It's the same as GIS, you wouldn't say jizz now would you?
I absolutely do, every single time it comes up.
I hadn't thought about how to pronounce GIS, but do you have a problem with the pronunciation of the Japanese Industrial Standards: JIS?
i am absolutely going to from now on
The developer of the format declared the pronunciation 30+ years ago. It has always been jif.
I take it that you haven’t met the Arcgees people…
How do you pronounce giraffe?
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 <i>was</i> 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. ;)<p>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 have never heard this third option before but I love it!
I do too. The idea that any one pronunciation is more correct based on the letters is quite amusing, given there's examples that work all ways.
How do you pronounce gift?
gorge = george
And "hallucination" which should have been "delusion".<p>Way early on (spring 2023) people tried to stop it, but no luck.
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.<p>That said, I entirely agree that MS is misrepresenting their openness here, which isn’t in the least surprising.
? 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.
I don't disagree, but it <i>is</i> 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)
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)
At least it's MIT licensed! As much as non-open training data irks me, restrictive licensing irks me more!
What you said makes a lot of sense. Free software should not be confused with open source
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).<p>Then there's "Smart" in front of Car, Phone, TV, and so on... Meaning different things.<p>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.
Open weights is not exactly right either because we do get source of the software that uses those open weights.<p>Maybe open inference?<p>But we often also get source code for fine tunning the model.<p>So maybe it's closer to open source than to anything else?<p>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?
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.<p>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.
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Openwashing is the new greenwashing, which, coincidently, seems to have gone out of fashion a few hundred datacentres ago.
I think in this category, Voxtral by Mistral is a lot better. It also happens to be small enough to run on webGPU <a href="https://huggingface.co/spaces/mistralai/Voxtral-Realtime-WebGPU" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/spaces/mistralai/Voxtral-Realtime-Web...</a>
Interesting story about this repo/product/author by cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont: <a href="https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116454846703138243" rel="nofollow">https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116454846703138243</a>
Isn't this project the one Microsoft published but then soon after pulled it for security/safety reasons? What has changed since then?
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.
It’s confusing (at least for me) because the project covers a number of things including what you are mentioning.
[off topic]<p>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<p>People will also post their own interpretations in response to comments, and quickly find out they missed something.<p>… 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.<p>[on topic]<p>(OK I’m done making excuses, time to read the article… thanks for the encouragement!)<p>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:<p>“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.”
Interesting to see "vibe" enshrined by the likes of Microsoft as an AI product word.
Especially when "vibe coded" can have a negative connotation meaning quickly put together without understanding.
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!
I’m just surprised they put the name of the e-waste slop company in their product
Maybe they were trying to make a pun on "Via Voice", the cursed IBM STT from the 90s?
Which makes it even more weird they get offended when people use Mircoslop. They are the ones leaning into the marketing
"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:<p>> 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<p>[1] <a href="https://snscratchpad.com/posts/looking-ahead-2026/" rel="nofollow">https://snscratchpad.com/posts/looking-ahead-2026/</a>
Are you sure you have the correct reference?<p>I think everyone else is relating to<p><a href="https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-bans-word-microslop-discord-lock" rel="nofollow">https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-bans-...</a>
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.
I'm honestly more surprised that they could resist the temptation to call it Copilot
Microsoft continues to be completely incapable of coming up with good names for their products and services
Great post last night from Simon: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/vibevoice/" rel="nofollow">https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/vibevoice/</a>
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.
“VibeVoice can only handle up to an hour of audio”<p>Why?
Holy moly, a Microsoft AI product that isn't named Copilot!
The 60-minute single-pass transcription is the part that actually matters. Most ASR models chunk audio and you lose speaker continuity across boundaries. If the diarization actually holds up on hour-long recordings without drifting, thats a real solve for podcast and meeting transcription workflows.
You have selected Microsoft Sam as the computer's default voice.
Still waiting for the open weights model that conclusively beats the multi-year old Whisper in accuracy, features, and performance.
So we've really just settled on Vibe as the verb for AI then?
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?
Why use precise technical language when you can just vibe with your AI system?
Microsoft Store App Vibing.exe Accused of Harvesting Screens, Audio, and Clipboard Data:<p><a href="https://cyberpress.org/microsoft-store-app-vibing-exe-accused/" rel="nofollow">https://cyberpress.org/microsoft-store-app-vibing-exe-accuse...</a>
Surprised it wasn't called Copilot Voice
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.
When mixing languages, why does the English have Chinese accent and Chinese have English accent? Is it a feature or bug?
I took a look into local options for ASR and diarization some months ago, I missed that VibeVoice now has this feature.<p>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.<p>Have the VibeVoice, Voxtral, Qwen or the Nemo solutions caught up in segmentation and speaker recognition?
It highly depends on the sort of data you’re processing (phone calls, podcasts, meetings of more people recorded using single channel?). For NVIDIA/NeMo, check out their softformer diarization models (also streaming).
Shouldn't it be called something like "Copilot Voice"?
I the past month or so, I added 2 models to my app Whisper Memos (<a href="https://whispermemos.com" rel="nofollow">https://whispermemos.com</a>):<p>- Cohere Transcribe (self hosted)<p>- Grok Speech To Text (they provide an API, only $0.10/hr!)<p>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've had good experiences with the Mistral Voxtral models (I've used the API, but some of the model-variants are open weight)
Does Cohere work with longer transcripts? Do you have to do some magic to merge recordings over 35 seconds long?
Have you tried qwen?
Any non-Musk alternatives that are comparable in quality and cost?
Voxtral competes on price ($0.003/min) and quality. Speechmatics has best in class accuracy but is a bit more expensive ($0.004/min)
Our default is still OpenAI Whisper. Grok is just a choice for users who might prefer it.
Someone tell me if this is better or worse than Parakeet
Microsoft has historically made poor choices in product naming, but this has to be a new low.
What’s the current state of the art, for each of training locally and in the cloud, for learning my voice?
Locally maybe <a href="https://voicebox.sh/" rel="nofollow">https://voicebox.sh/</a><p>Elevenlabs in the cloud.
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.
open weights i would say S2: <a href="https://github.com/rodrigomatta/s2.cpp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/rodrigomatta/s2.cpp</a>
Explains most of the shit they have pushing with Windows 11. Perhaps all that bloatware was VibeVoiced too.
Seriously, VibeVoice? Microslop really has a penchant for the worst names.
Isn't voxtral much better?
It would have been better if they provided not just weights, but also some frontend where it is usable as is.
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.
This is a very good model, but can it be run on the web?
For me its giving me very poor results
What the do they mean by frontier voice
looks like this offers ASR support in GGUF <a href="https://github.com/CrispStrobe/CrispASR" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/CrispStrobe/CrispASR</a> -- haven't tested
English only?
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?<p>The TTS example clip in the repo of 'spontaneous singing' is creepy as fuck
Previously:<p><i>Sept 2025</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45114245">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45114245</a>
Microsoft is famous for choosing terrible names but how could they be this terrible.
What a terrible name
lol they rug-pulled the 7B for our own safety some months ago