Ollama, the popular app for running AI models locally, announced that its Mac app now supports text-to-speech generation, with Windows and Linux support coming soon. Here are the details.

If you’re not familiar with Ollama, it is a platform that lets users download and run open AI models locally on their Macs, or access more powerful models through the cloud. It is also available for Windows and Linux.

Ollama itself is open-source and has become one of the most popular AI projects on GitHub, with nearly 185,000 stars and around 18,600 forks. You can learn more about it here.

On macOS, Ollama uses Apple’s MLX, an open-source machine learning framework that leverages Apple Silicon’s unified memory architecture, enabling supported AI models to run faster and more efficiently.

Once users get Ollama up and running, they can download compatible open-source AI models from repositories such as Hugging Face and run them directly on their Macs.

This means they can use AI without an internet connection or sending their data to external servers, although performance and the size of the models they can run depend heavily on their Mac’s hardware.

That said, Ollama recently announced support for Phonon, a family of text-to-speech models developed by Gradium, marking the first time the platform supports speech generation.

As Ollama explains, speech is generated in real time, meaning users can listen to AI-generated responses as they’re being produced, rather than waiting for the entire response to finish.

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