Moshi
Speech-text foundation model for full-duplex real-time spoken dialogue with neural audio codec.
About
Moshi, from Kyutai Labs, is a speech-text foundation model built for full-duplex spoken dialogue: it models the user's audio and its own audio as separate parallel streams, so it can listen and speak at the same time instead of taking turns. Architecturally it pairs a 7B parameter Temporal Transformer with a smaller Depth Transformer that handles inter-codebook structure, reaching a theoretical latency of 160 ms and about 200 ms in practice on an L4 GPU. Audio flows through Mimi, the project's streaming neural codec, which represents 24 kHz audio at 12.5 Hz frames and 1.1 kbps with 80 ms latency, a frame rate close to text token rates that keeps autoregressive steps manageable. The repository ships three backends: PyTorch for research, MLX for Apple silicon, and Rust with Candle for production serving. Code is released under MIT (Python) and Apache (Rust) licenses with model weights under CC-BY 4.0, making it a key open reference implementation for real-time voice AI.
Should you use Moshi?
Pick it when
Pick Moshi when you are building or researching a full-duplex voice assistant that must listen and talk at the same time with about 200 ms latency, and you have a 24 GB GPU or an Apple silicon machine for the MLX backend.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it if you need plain text-to-speech, a choice of voices, or control over which LLM writes the replies, since Moshi is an end-to-end 7B dialogue model. Kyutai TTS from the same lab streams speech from any LLM's text.
Alternatives to Moshi
- Kyutai TTS
Same lab and Mimi codec, but a streaming TTS you place after your own LLM, so you keep model choice instead of Moshi's built-in 7B dialogue model.
- GLM-4-Voice
Open end-to-end speech chat in Chinese and English with natural language control of emotion and dialect, though no full-duplex mode is described.
- Pipecat
Cascaded STT, LLM, and TTS pipeline where every stage is swappable, trading Moshi's single-model latency for control over each component.
- Qwen2.5-Omni
End-to-end model that also takes images and video and answers in streamed speech, with a 3B variant and Int4 quantizations, but no full-duplex listening is described.
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Details
- Category
- Text-to-Speech (TTS)
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Advanced (4/5)
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Minimum VRAM
- 24 GB
- Added
- May 7, 2026