Ultravox (via) Ultravox is "a multimodal Speech LLM built around a pretrained Whisper and Llama 3 backbone". It's effectively an openly licensed version of half of the GPT-4o model OpenAI demoed (but did not fully release) a few weeks ago: Ultravox is multimodal for audio input, but still relies on a separate text-to-speech engine for audio output.
You can try it out directly in your browser through this page on AI.TOWN - hit the "Call" button to start an in-browser voice conversation with the model.
I found the demo extremely impressive - really low latency and it was fun and engaging to talk to. Try saying "pretend to be a wise and sarcastic old fox" to kick it into a different personality.
The GitHub repo includes code for both training and inference, and the full model is available from Hugging Face - about 30GB of .safetensors
files.
Ultravox says it's licensed under MIT, but I would expect it to also have to inherit aspects of the Llama 3 license since it uses that as a base model.
Recent articles
- Building software on top of Large Language Models - 15th May 2025
- Trying out llama.cpp's new vision support - 10th May 2025
- Saying "hi" to Microsoft's Phi-4-reasoning - 6th May 2025