* feat(ced): sketch sound-classification backend (CED audio tagger) Wires ced.cpp (CED, 527-class AudioSet sound-event tagger; baby cry, footsteps, glass, alarms, dog bark) into LocalAI as a Go/purego backend. SKETCH (backend skeleton real; core REST wiring + CI/gallery is a checklist in DESIGN.md): - backend/backend.proto: new SoundDetection rpc + SoundClass messages (run `make protogen-go` to regenerate pkg/grpc/proto). - backend/go/ced: main.go (purego dlopen libced.so + ced_capi.h), goced.go (Ced gRPC backend: Load + SoundDetection), Makefile (clone-at-pin CED_VERSION, ggml static-PIC shared build), run.sh, package.sh, .gitignore. - DESIGN.md: REST /v1/audio/classification wiring (handler/route/capability registration checklist), gallery/index + CI registration, and a scoping note for the realtime/websocket live-recognition path (sliding-window classify over the existing ws transport + voicegate; the ced C-API per-PCM entry point is already window-friendly). Backend code does not compile until protogen-go regenerates the pb types and a libced.so is built (Makefile clones+builds it). Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * feat(ced): REST /v1/audio/classification endpoint + capability registration Wires the ced sound-event classification backend (AudioSet audio tagger) end to end through the REST surface, mirroring the transcription path. - Handler: core/http/endpoints/openai/sound_classification.go parses the multipart audio upload, temp-files it, resolves the model config and calls the SoundDetection RPC; returns {model, detections[]} JSON. - Backend wrapper: core/backend/sound_classification.go (ModelSoundDetection) loads the model and normalizes the proto response into schema types. - Schema: core/schema/sound_classification.go (SoundClassificationResult). - gRPC layer: SoundDetection wired through the LocalAI wrapper (interface, Backend client, Client, embed, server, base default) so the loader-typed client exposes the RPC; proto regenerated via make protogen-go. - Route: POST /v1/audio/classification (+ /audio/classification alias) with the audio/multipart default-model middleware in routes/openai.go. - Capability surfaces: swagger @Tags/@Router on the handler; FLAG_SOUND_ CLASSIFICATION usecase flag + UsecaseSoundClassification + UsecaseInfoMap + GuessUsecases + ModalityGroups + GetAllModelConfigUsecases; meta usecase option; /api/instructions audio area updated; auth RouteFeatureRegistry + FeatureAudioClassification (APIFeatures, default ON) + FeatureMetas; UI usecaseFilters, capabilities.js CAP_SOUND_CLASSIFICATION, Models.jsx filter + i18n; docs page features/audio-classification.md + whats-new + crosslink. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * feat(ced): realtime sound-event detection over the websocket API When a realtime pipeline configures a sound-classification model, each VAD-committed utterance (the same window the transcription path produces) is also run through the CED sound-event classifier and the scored AudioSet tags are emitted as a new server event. No new backend rpc is needed: the SoundDetection gRPC method already exists on this branch. - config: add Pipeline.SoundDetection (yaml/json sound_detection,omitempty) beside Transcription/VAD. - realtime: add Model.SoundDetection(ctx, audio, topK, threshold) to the ModelInterface; implement it on wrappedModel and transcriptOnlyModel by calling backend.ModelSoundDetection with the session's sound-classification model config (mirrors how Transcribe dispatches). Load the optional config in newModel / newTranscriptionOnlyModel; nil config keeps it additive. - types: add ConversationItemSoundDetectionEvent (item_id, content_index, detections[]{label,score,index}) with type conversation.item.sound_detection, its ServerEventType constant and MarshalJSON, mirroring the transcription completed event. - realtime: add emitSoundDetection (unary path: classify the committed window, build the event, t.SendEvent) and wire it at the utterance-commit hook right after emitTranscription; gated on session.SoundDetectionEnabled (resolved from Pipeline.SoundDetection at session setup, defaults top_k=5, threshold=0). Its error is logged via xlog but never aborts the turn. - test: Ginkgo specs for emitSoundDetection (tags emitted, empty detections, classifier error) plus a SoundDetection method on the fakeModel double. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * fix(ced): implement SoundDetection in nodes backend test doubles The SoundDetection method added to the grpc backend interface left two test doubles (fakeBackendClient, fakeGRPCBackend) incomplete, so core/services/nodes failed to compile under `go vet`/`go test` (go build missed it: the doubles live in _test.go). Add the method to both, mirroring their existing Detect mock. Repairs CI for the nodes package. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * feat(ced): decouple realtime sound detection from VAD (sound-only sessions) Sound-event detection must activate on sounds, not speech, so it no longer runs through the voice VAD/transcription path. A sound-detection-only pipeline (sound_detection set, no transcription/LLM) now: - is accepted by prepareRealtimeConfig (sound_detection counts as a pipeline stage), - builds a lightweight model via newSoundDetectionOnlyModel (no VAD/STT/LLM/TTS loaded), and - defaults the session to turn_detection none (no VAD) with no transcription stage, so the client drives windowing via input_audio_buffer.commit (option A: client-side sliding window). The per-PCM C-API already supports arbitrary windows. commitUtterance gains a sound-only branch: it emits the conversation.item.sound_detection event (scored AudioSet tags) and stops - no transcription, no LLM response. generateResponse is now guarded on a transcription stage being present, so a sound-only turn never invokes the LLM. Existing transcription/VAD sessions are unchanged (additive). Added a commitUtterance sound-only Ginkgo spec asserting it emits the sound event and neither transcribes nor generates a response. go vet + golangci-lint (new-from-merge-base) clean; openai suite green. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * feat(ced): register sound-classification backend in gallery + CI Mechanical backend-image registration for the ced sound-event classifier, mirroring the parakeet-cpp Go/purego backend everywhere it is wired up. - .github/backend-matrix.yml: add the ced build matrix, field-for-field copies of the parakeet-cpp entries (cpu amd64/arm64, cublas cuda 12/13 amd64, l4t cuda-13 arm64, l4t-jetpack cuda-12 arm64, sycl f32/f16, vulkan amd64/arm64, rocm hipblas, and the metal darwin entry), changing only backend and tag-suffix. dockerfile stays ./backend/Dockerfile.golang. - backend/index.yaml: add the &ced meta anchor (capabilities map per platform) plus ced-development and the per-arch image entries, each uri/mirror tag-suffix matching the matrix exactly. The model gallery (GGUF) entry is intentionally deferred pending the HuggingFace publish (TODO note inline). - scripts/changed-backends.js: add an explicit item.backend === "ced" branch in inferBackendPath mapping to backend/go/ced/, same mechanism and ordering as the parakeet-cpp branch (before the generic golang fallthrough). - .github/workflows/bump_deps.yaml: register mudler/ced.cpp -> CED_VERSION in backend/go/ced/Makefile so the daily bot bumps the pin. - swagger/{docs.go,swagger.json,swagger.yaml}: regenerated via make swagger so the existing /v1/audio/classification annotations land in the generated spec. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * feat(ced): server-side windowing for realtime sound detection (option B) Adds an optional server-driven sliding-window classifier so a sound-only realtime client only has to stream audio (no input_audio_buffer.commit): - Pipeline.sound_detection_window_ms / sound_detection_hop_ms config knobs. When both > 0 on a sound-only session, the server classifies the last window of streamed audio every hop and emits a conversation.item.sound_ detection event; the input buffer is trimmed to one window so a long stream stays bounded. When unset, the session stays client-driven (option A). Runs independent of VAD (sound events are not speech). - handleSoundWindow (ticker) + classifySoundWindow (one tick, extracted so it is unit-testable) + writeWindowWAV, which declares the true InputSampleRate (NewWAVHeaderWithRate) so the classifier resamples correctly. Goroutine is started after toggleVAD and torn down with the session (close + wg.Wait). - Register pipeline.sound_detection (+window_ms/hop_ms) in the config meta registry; the earlier realtime commit added pipeline.sound_detection without a registry entry, failing TestAllFieldsHaveRegistryEntries. This fixes that and covers the two new knobs. Tests: classifySoundWindow emits an event + trims the buffer to one window, no-ops on too-little audio; writeWindowWAV declares the given sample rate. go build/vet + golangci-lint (new-from-merge-base) clean; config + openai suites green. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * feat(ced): add ced-base GGUF model gallery entries (f16 + q8_0) The ced-base weights are now published at mudler/ced-base-gguf (Apache-2.0, converted from mispeech/ced-base). Adds gallery/ced.yaml (backend: ced + known_usecases: sound_classification) and two gallery/index.yaml entries (ced-base-f16 default, ced-base-q8 smallest) with sha256-pinned files, and removes the now-resolved TODO from backend/index.yaml. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * feat(ced): add tiny/mini/small GGUF model gallery entries Publishes the rest of the CED family (same architecture, metadata-driven port verified end-to-end on ced-tiny) to mudler/ced-{tiny,mini,small}-gguf and adds their f16 + q8_0 gallery entries: ced-tiny (5.5M, edge/Pi-class) f16 11MB / q8_0 6MB ced-mini (9.6M) f16 19MB / q8_0 11MB ced-small (22M) f16 42MB / q8_0 23MB All sha256-pinned. ced-base remains the accuracy default. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * chore(ced): point gallery entries at the consolidated mudler/ced-gguf repo All CED quantizations (tiny/mini/small/base, f16/q8_0) now live in a single HuggingFace repo, mudler/ced-gguf, instead of per-model repos. Repoint the 8 gallery model entries' urls + file uris accordingly. sha256 and filenames are unchanged. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * chore(ced): bump CED_VERSION to the short-clip fix Pin the ced backend to ced.cpp 99c6ed3, which fixes a crash on any clip shorter than target_length (~10.11s): time_pos_embed was added at its full 63-frame grid instead of being sliced to the clip's actual time grid, tripping ggml_can_repeat in ggml_add. Surfaced by the live realtime e2e (sub-10s windows) and gated with a short-clip parity test upstream. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * docs(ced): list ced.cpp as a LocalAI-team engine + backend-guide directive - README.md: add ced.cpp to the "native C/C++/GGML engines developed and maintained by the LocalAI project" table. - docs/content/features/backends.md: add a Sound Classification backend category (sound-event classification / audio tagging) listing ced.cpp. - .agents/adding-backends.md: add a "Documenting the backend" section and two verification-checklist items requiring new backends to be documented in the backends.md category list, and in-house native engines to be added to the README maintained-engines table. This directive was missing. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * chore(ced): repin CED_VERSION to the v0.1.0 release commit ced.cpp history was squashed into a single release commit (tagged v0.1.0), so the previous pin (99c6ed3) no longer exists upstream. Pin to c04ac14, the v0.1.0 release commit, so the backend builds against a commit that exists. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> * fix(ced): silence gosec G304/G103 + govet unsafeptr on audited paths - sound_classification.go: os.Create(dst) where dst = temp dir + path.Base of the upload (no traversal). #nosec G304, matching the depth-anything-cpp handler. - goced.go: reading a NUL-terminated C string from a libced-owned buffer. #nosec G103 (gosec) + //nolint:govet (golangci-lint's unsafeptr check), since the uintptr is a C-owned malloc'd buffer, not Go-GC memory. Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> --------- Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io> Co-authored-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
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LocalAI is the open-source AI engine. Run any model - LLMs, vision, voice, image, video - on any hardware. No GPU required.
A small core, not a bundle. Each backend wraps a best-in-class engine (llama.cpp, vLLM, whisper.cpp, stable-diffusion, MLX...) in its own image, pulled only when a model needs it. You install nothing you don't use.
- Composable by design: backends are separate and pulled on demand, so you install only what your model needs
- Open and extensible: load any model, or build your own backend in any language against an open interface
- Drop-in API compatibility: OpenAI, Anthropic, and ElevenLabs APIs across every backend
- Any model, any modality: LLMs, vision, voice, image, and video behind one API
- Any hardware: NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Apple Silicon, Vulkan, or CPU-only
- Multi-user ready: API key auth, user quotas, role-based access
- Built-in AI agents: autonomous agents with tool use, RAG, MCP, and skills
- Privacy-first: your data never leaves your infrastructure
Created by Ettore Di Giacinto and maintained by the LocalAI team.
📖 Documentation | 💬 Discord | 💻 Quickstart | 🖼️ Models | ❓FAQ
Guided tour
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/08cbb692-57da-48f7-963d-2e7b43883c18
Click to see more!
User and auth
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/228fa9ad-81a3-4d43-bfb9-31557e14a36c
Agents
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/6270b331-e21d-4087-a540-6290006b381a
Usage metrics per user
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/cbb03379-23b4-4e3d-bd26-d152f057007f
Fine-tuning and Quantization
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5ba4ace9-d3df-4795-b7d4-b0b404ea71ee
WebRTC
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ed88e34c-fed3-4b83-8a67-4716a9feeb7b
Quickstart
macOS
Note: The DMG is not signed by Apple. After installing, run:
sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/LocalAI.app. See #6268 for details.
Containers (Docker, podman, ...)
Already ran LocalAI before? Use
docker start -i local-aito restart an existing container.
CPU only:
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 localai/localai:latest
NVIDIA GPU:
# CUDA 13
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-gpu-nvidia-cuda-13
# CUDA 12
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-gpu-nvidia-cuda-12
# NVIDIA Jetson ARM64 (CUDA 12, for AGX Orin and similar)
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-nvidia-l4t-arm64
# NVIDIA Jetson ARM64 (CUDA 13, for DGX Spark)
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --gpus all localai/localai:latest-nvidia-l4t-arm64-cuda-13
AMD GPU (ROCm):
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --device=/dev/kfd --device=/dev/dri --group-add=video localai/localai:latest-gpu-hipblas
Intel GPU (oneAPI):
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 --device=/dev/dri/card1 --device=/dev/dri/renderD128 localai/localai:latest-gpu-intel
Vulkan GPU:
docker run -ti --name local-ai -p 8080:8080 localai/localai:latest-gpu-vulkan
Loading models
# From the model gallery (see available models with `local-ai models list` or at https://models.localai.io)
local-ai run llama-3.2-1b-instruct:q4_k_m
# From Huggingface
local-ai run huggingface://TheBloke/phi-2-GGUF/phi-2.Q8_0.gguf
# From the Ollama OCI registry
local-ai run ollama://gemma:2b
# From a YAML config
local-ai run https://gist.githubusercontent.com/.../phi-2.yaml
# From a standard OCI registry (e.g., Docker Hub)
local-ai run oci://localai/phi-2:latest
To test a running LocalAI server from the terminal, open an interactive chat session from another shell. Inside the prompt, /models lists installed models and /model <name> switches between them.
# Terminal 1
local-ai run llama-3.2-1b-instruct:q4_k_m
# Terminal 2
local-ai chat --model llama-3.2-1b-instruct:q4_k_m
Automatic Backend Detection: LocalAI automatically detects your GPU capabilities and downloads the appropriate backend. For advanced options, see GPU Acceleration.
For more details, see the Getting Started guide.
Latest News
- June 2026: New realtime voice assistant demo (a tiny Go client for the Realtime API with a full talk-back voice loop and tool calling), plus streaming of the realtime LLM / TTS / transcription pipeline stages and configurable WebRTC ICE candidates.
- June 2026: Big speech push: the parakeet.cpp ASR engine gains NeMo-faithful segment timestamps, a multilingual streaming Nemotron-3.5 model, dynamic batching for concurrent transcription and CUDA graphs; the new CrispASR backend adds multi-architecture ASR + TTS, and 60 Piper TTS voices across 42 languages land in the gallery (plus per-request TTS instructions and params).
- June 2026: New backends and models: locate-anything.cpp for open-vocabulary object detection via ggml, Ideogram4 image generation in stablediffusion-ggml, llama.cpp video input, and the Gemma 4 QAT family with MTP speculative-decoding pairs. Plus an interactive CLI chat mode and RAG source citations in agent responses.
- June 2026: Distributed mode hardening: prefix-cache-aware routing, a production-ready request router with auto-sized embedding/rerank batches, ds4 layer-split distributed inference, NATS JWT auth + TLS/mTLS, and resumable file uploads.
- May 2026: LocalAI 4.3.0 -
llama.cppprompt cache on by default (repeated system prompts collapse from minutes to seconds), keyless cosign signing of backend OCI images, per-API-key + per-user usage attribution, Distributed v3 with per-request replica routing. Release notes - May 2026: LocalAI 4.2.0 - LocalAI sees and hears: voice recognition, face recognition + antispoofing liveness, speaker diarization. Plus drop-in Ollama API, video generation, redesigned UI with i18n + admin-configurable branding, vLLM at feature parity with llama.cpp, and 11 new backends. Release notes
- April 2026: LocalAI 4.1.0 - LocalAI becomes a control tower: distributed cluster mode with VRAM-aware smart routing + autoscaling, multi-user platform with OIDC and API keys, per-user quotas with predictive analytics, in-UI fine-tuning with TRL (auto-export to GGUF), on-the-fly quantization backend, visual pipeline editor. Release notes
- March 2026: LocalAI 4.0.0 - native agentic orchestration with the new Agenthub community hub, full React UI rewrite with Canvas mode, MCP Apps + client-side with tool streaming, WebRTC realtime audio, MLX-distributed. Release notes
- February 2026: Realtime API for audio-to-audio with tool calling, ACE-Step 1.5 support
- January 2026: LocalAI 3.10.0 — Anthropic API support, Open Responses API, video & image generation (LTX-2), unified GPU backends, tool streaming, Moonshine, Pocket-TTS. Release notes
- December 2025: Dynamic Memory Resource reclaimer, Automatic multi-GPU model fitting (llama.cpp), Vibevoice backend
- November 2025: Import models via URL, Multiple chats and history
- October 2025: Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for agentic capabilities
- September 2025: New Launcher for macOS and Linux, extended backend support for Mac and Nvidia L4T, MLX-Audio, WAN 2.2
- August 2025: MLX, MLX-VLM, Diffusers, llama.cpp now supported on Apple Silicon
- July 2025: All backends migrated outside the main binary — lightweight, modular architecture
For older news and full release notes, see GitHub Releases and the News page.
Features
- Text generation (
llama.cpp,transformers,vllm... and more) - Text to Audio
- Audio to Text
- Image generation
- OpenAI-compatible tools API
- Realtime API (Speech-to-speech)
- Embeddings generation
- Constrained grammars
- Download models from Huggingface
- Vision API
- Object Detection
- Reranker API
- P2P Inferencing
- Distributed Mode — Horizontal scaling with PostgreSQL + NATS
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Built-in Agents — Autonomous AI agents with tool use, RAG, skills, SSE streaming, and Agent Hub
- Backend Gallery — Install/remove backends on the fly via OCI images
- Voice Activity Detection (Silero-VAD)
- Integrated WebUI
Supported Backends & Acceleration
LocalAI supports 60+ backends including llama.cpp, vLLM, SGLang, transformers, whisper.cpp, diffusers, MLX, MLX-VLM, and many more. Hardware acceleration is available for NVIDIA (CUDA 12/13), AMD (ROCm), Intel (oneAPI/SYCL), Apple Silicon (Metal), Vulkan, and NVIDIA Jetson (L4T). All backends can be installed on-the-fly from the Backend Gallery.
See the full Backend & Model Compatibility Table and GPU Acceleration guide.
Backends built by us
Most backends wrap a best-in-class upstream engine. A handful of them are native C/C++/GGML engines (no Python at inference) developed and maintained by the LocalAI project itself:
| Backend | What it does |
|---|---|
| parakeet.cpp | C++/GGML port of NVIDIA NeMo Parakeet ASR (tdt/ctc/rnnt/hybrid), with cache-aware streaming transcription |
| ced.cpp | C++/GGML port of the CED audio-tagging models: sound-event classification (527-class AudioSet) over REST and the realtime API for live recognition |
| voxtral.c | Voxtral Realtime 4B speech-to-text in pure C |
| vibevoice.cpp | Native port of Microsoft VibeVoice for TTS (voice cloning) and long-form ASR with speaker diarization |
| rf-detr.cpp | Native RF-DETR object detection and instance segmentation |
| locate-anything.cpp | Open-vocabulary object detection and visual grounding (LocateAnything-3B) |
| depth-anything.cpp | Depth Anything 3 monocular metric depth + camera pose estimation |
| privacy-filter.cpp | Standalone GGML PII/NER token-classification engine powering LocalAI's PII redaction tier |
| LocalVQE | Joint acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression, and dereverberation |
| local-store | Local-first vector database for embeddings (shipped in-tree) |
We also maintain apex-quant, a per-tensor, per-layer quantization recipe for Mixture-of-Experts models that exploits their structural sparsity to produce GGUFs matching or beating Q8_0 quality - and they run out of the box on stock llama.cpp.
Resources
- Documentation
- LLM fine-tuning guide
- Build from source
- Kubernetes installation
- Integrations & community projects
- Installation video walkthrough
- Media & blog posts
- Examples — including the realtime voice assistant demo (Go client for the Realtime API with tool calling)
Team
LocalAI is maintained by a small team of humans, together with the wider community of contributors.
- Ettore Di Giacinto — original author and project lead
- Richard Palethorpe — maintainer
A huge thank you to everyone who contributes code, reviews PRs, files issues, and helps users in Discord — LocalAI is a community-driven project and wouldn't exist without you. See the full contributors list.
Citation
If you utilize this repository, data in a downstream project, please consider citing it with:
@misc{localai,
author = {Ettore Di Giacinto},
title = {LocalAI: The free, Open source OpenAI alternative},
year = {2023},
publisher = {GitHub},
journal = {GitHub repository},
howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/go-skynet/LocalAI}},
Sponsors
Do you find LocalAI useful?
Support the project by becoming a backer or sponsor. Your logo will show up here with a link to your website.
A huge thank you to our generous sponsors who support this project covering CI expenses, and our Sponsor list:
Individual sponsors
A special thanks to individual sponsors, a full list is on GitHub and buymeacoffee. Special shout out to drikster80 for being generous. Thank you everyone!
Star history
License
LocalAI is a community-driven project created by Ettore Di Giacinto and maintained by the LocalAI team.
MIT - Author Ettore Di Giacinto mudler@localai.io
Acknowledgements
LocalAI couldn't have been built without the help of great software already available from the community. Thank you!
- llama.cpp
- https://github.com/tatsu-lab/stanford_alpaca
- https://github.com/cornelk/llama-go for the initial ideas
- https://github.com/antimatter15/alpaca.cpp
- https://github.com/EdVince/Stable-Diffusion-NCNN
- https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp
- https://github.com/rhasspy/piper
- exo for the MLX distributed auto-parallel sharding implementation
Contributors
This is a community project, a special thanks to our contributors!

