Ollama now runs Phonon, small text-to-speech models that read text aloud on a Mac with no subscription. The license differs by language.
Ollama, a free app for running AI models on your own computer, can now read text aloud on a Mac. It uses Phonon, a family of small text-to-speech models from a company called Gradium. Everything runs on the Mac itself, and no subscription is required.
Phonon turns any text into spoken audio. English voices include Zoey, Easton, Freya and Hugh, with American and British accents. There are also models for French, German, Spanish and Portuguese.
You can pair Phonon with a chat model so its replies are read out loud. Playback starts after the first sentence, so there is no wait for the full answer. Ollama says Phonon runs 35% faster than Gradium's own software on a MacBook Pro with an M5 Max chip, with no loss in accuracy.
The English model is free to use under the Apache 2.0 license. The French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and multilingual models are for noncommercial use only. A business using those voices should look at the terms first.
Windows and Linux support is described as coming soon, but no date was given. The material also does not say how much memory the models need.
Mac owners with Apple Silicon can get free read-aloud voices in Ollama, but only the English model is cleared for business use.
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