Ollama Now Lets Your Computer Talk Back—No Cloud Needed
Your own computer can now read text aloud and answer questions—privately and for free.
Ollama, a free program that lets you run AI models on your own laptop or desktop, just got a major upgrade. The biggest news: it can now generate speech. That means you can type a message and have the AI read it back to you out loud, or even have a back-and-forth conversation where the AI speaks its replies. This all happens on your device—no internet needed after the initial download—so your conversations stay private. It works on Apple Silicon Macs (M1 and newer) and is coming to other platforms.
Second, Ollama now includes a family of small AI models called d3 that are specially designed to make decisions. You can give them some text, an image, or structured data and ask them to classify it, answer yes/no, or rank options with probabilities. These models come in four sizes (2B, 4B, 9B, and 27B parameters) so you can pick one that fits your computer's power. This is useful for building apps that need to sort information quickly without relying on the cloud.
Finally, the tool Flint, which helps manage Ollama, now runs on Linux and Windows in addition to macOS. So more people can use it regardless of their operating system. Overall, this release makes it easier for anyone to have a private, talking AI assistant and to build smart apps that run entirely on their own machine—saving money on cloud fees and keeping data secure.
- Ollama can now read text aloud and speak AI replies on Apple Silicon Macs, with audio streaming for apps.
- New d3 models let you classify, answer yes/no, or score options using text, images, or data—all locally.
- Flint, a tool for managing Ollama, now works on Linux and Windows, not just macOS.
Why It Matters
You can have a private, talking AI assistant on your own computer—no cloud fees, no data leaks.