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Ollama launched its speech model Phonon on October 24, 2026, beginning support for text-to-speech. According to the Ollama Blog, Phonon is a series of small text-to-speech models from Gradium, currently available on macOS, with Windows and Linux support coming soon. On a MacBook Pro with M5 Max, Ollama uses MLX acceleration to run 35% faster than Gradium's own runtime, with word error rate on par with the Hugging Face Transformers reference implementation. Phonon is compatible with OpenAI's /v1/audio/speech interface, so existing OpenAI SDK code only needs its base URL changed. On licensing, phonon is released under Apache 2.0, while the 40M model uses the CC BY-NC 4.0 license and is restricted to non-commercial use. There are currently no subsequent developments.
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Ollama Launches Speech Model Phonon, Supporting Text-to-SpeechDevelopments
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- Source:Ollama Blog
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Oct 24
Ollama BlogFirst-partySelected
Ollama Launches Speech Model Phonon, Supporting Text-to-Speech
Ollama can now convert text to speech. Its first speech model is the Phonon series of small text-to-speech models from Gradium. It is currently available on macOS, with Windows and Linux support coming soon. On a MacBook Pro equipped with M5 Max, Ollama, with the help of MLX acceleration, is 35% faster than Gradium's own runtime, and its word error rate is on par with the Hugging Face Transformers reference implementation. Phonon is compatible with OpenAI's /v1/audio/speech interface, so existing OpenAI SDK code only needs to change the base URL; phonon is released under Apache 2.0, and the 40M model uses the CC BY-NC 4.0 license and is for non-commercial use only.