Phonon vs. Inkling

Phonon is an open-weight text-to-speech (TTS) model and inference runtime that caters to developers who wish to integrate speech generation into applications with local and offline audio functionalities. This cutting-edge system converts written text into spoken words and can stream speech in real-time as it is generated. It provides interfaces for programming languages such as Rust and Python, includes a Swift package for iOS and macOS, offers JavaScript support for web browsers, and has libraries available for Android; it can also operate as a self-hosted server compatible with OpenAI's API. The model is designed to support various languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, depending on the specific variant employed. Phonon is ideal for developers looking to embed speech capabilities into mobile, desktop, web, embedded, and server applications, particularly in situations that prioritize offline use or require enhanced privacy. The English model is comprised of 31 million parameters and is licensed under Apache 2.0, while the language-specific and multilingual models, with 40 million parameters, are available under CC BY-NC 4.0. Furthermore, the runtime's source code is offered under either the Apache 2.0 or MIT licenses, ensuring it is accessible for diverse development requirements. This adaptability and extensive support position Phonon as a highly versatile option for speech synthesis across a variety of platforms, making it a valuable asset for developers in the field.

Inkling is an open-weights multimodal AI model from Thinking Machines built to support customization, agentic workflows, coding, reasoning, vision, audio, and enterprise AI use cases. The model is a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 975 billion total parameters, 41 billion active parameters, 256 routed experts per MoE layer, and six routed experts active per token. It supports context windows up to 1 million tokens and was pretrained on 45 trillion tokens across text, images, audio, and video. Inkling is designed as a broad foundation model rather than a narrowly optimized benchmark model, giving it balanced capabilities across reasoning, coding, factuality, instruction following, vision, audio, tool use, and safety. Its controllable thinking effort lets developers adjust how much computation and generated reasoning the model uses, helping teams balance quality, latency, and cost for different production needs. The model can run agentic coding tasks, use tools, create web apps, generate polished multi-page artifacts, reason over long contexts, and work through iterative refinement loops. For multimodal tasks, Inkling can process images, answer questions about visual content, transcribe and reason over audio, follow spoken instructions, and combine visual reasoning with code-based tools such as Python. Thinking Machines trained Inkling for calibration, instruction following, factual reliability, refusal behavior, and safety across multiple modalities, including evaluations for dangerous capabilities and human-AI threat vectors. Inkling is available on Tinker for fine-tuning, with 64K and 256K context options, an Inkling Playground for testing, cookbook recipes, and support for multimodal post-training workflows. Its full weights are available on Hugging Face, and deployment support is available through APIs and infrastructure partners such as TogetherAI, Fireworks, Modal, Databricks, Baseten, SGLang, vLLM, llama.cpp, and transformers.