Moshi
A speech-text foundation model for real time dialogue
Moshi is a speech-text foundation model and full-duplex spoken dialogue framework. It uses Mimi, a state-of-the-art streaming neural audio codec. Mimi processes 24 kHz audio, down to a 12.5 Hz representation with a bandwidth of 1.1 kbps, in a fully streaming manner (latency of 80ms, the frame size), yet performs better than existing, non-streaming, codecs like SpeechTokenizer (50 Hz, 4kbps), or SemantiCodec (50 Hz, 1.3kbps). Moshi models two streams of audio: one corresponds to Moshi, and the other one to the user. At inference, the stream from the user is taken from the audio input, and the one for Moshi is sampled from the model's output. Along these two audio streams, Moshi predicts text tokens corresponding to its own speech, its inner monologue, which greatly improves the quality of its generation. A small Depth Transformer models inter codebook dependencies for a given time step, while a large, 7B parameter Temporal Transformer models the temporal dependencies.