Ettore Di Giacinto d31e923bb7 backend(audio-cpp): bound the lane a live stream can hold
AudioTranscriptionLive holds the model's inference lane for the whole stream,
which is correct (the streaming session is stateful and a concurrent run would
interleave two callers' audio) and newly dangerous. Every other RPC holds the
lane across compute, or across a write to a slow reader, and both of those
terminate on their own. A live stream instead blocks in a client-driven read,
and a peer that goes silent WITHOUT closing the stream never terminates
anything: the lane stays taken and every other request against that model queues
behind a client that stopped speaking.

live_watchdog is a one-shot idle timer that ends the stream when no frame has
arrived inside a window. It is standard library only, so it is unit tested
without an engine. gRPC's synchronous Read has no timeout and cannot be given
one, so the only way to unblock it is ServerContext::TryCancel, which decides
the wire status itself: the client sees CANCELLED rather than the
DEADLINE_EXCEEDED the handler returns, the reason is logged, and the lane coming
back is the point. When it fires the read loop throws rather than reporting
end-of-input, so the driver does not go on to finalize a decode nobody is
waiting for.

It is armed only after the lane is taken and disarmed as soon as the read side
closes, and both ends matter. Arming earlier would cover acquire(), which
legitimately blocks while another live stream runs, so a queued caller would be
cancelled for waiting its turn. Disarming later would cover our own decode,
where a window overrun is not a peer going quiet and cancelling would throw away
the transcript the client is waiting for.

The window is the new live_idle_timeout_ms option, 30 s by default, 0 meaning no
limit. core/http/endpoints/openai/realtime.go drives a 300 ms ticker and feeds
every tick that produced new audio while a turn is open, so 30 s of silence is a
hundred ticks that delivered nothing. It is also longer than any pause a speaker
takes mid-utterance, which is the case that must never be cut off, and
backend.proto lets one stream span many utterances, so a client that pauses
longer between them raises the option rather than discovering it.

Two smaller corrections in the same handler:

  - check_can_serve now runs BEFORE the sample rate check.
    pkg/grpc/grpcerrors/errors.go degrades to the file path on UNIMPLEMENTED and
    on nothing else, so a live-incapable model asked at a wrong rate was
    answering INVALID_ARGUMENT and costing the caller its fallback.
  - a negative sample rate is refused instead of silently becoming 16000. Zero
    still means 16000, which is what the proto documents; -1 is malformed rather
    than absent and gets the same refusal every other bad rate gets.

And one thing recorded rather than changed, at the handler: "live" here means
incremental INPUT, not low latency, and with the pinned families it does not yet
mean incremental OUTPUT either. nemotron_asr's process_audio_chunk only appends
to its buffer, so its whole decode and every delta happen inside finalize(),
after the client closes its send side. The policy-window buffering is inert for
that family and matters only for vibevoice_asr and higgs_audio_stt.

Verified on the wire with live_idle_timeout_ms:3000. A silent client acked at
371 ms and was cancelled at 3.371 s; a second live stream opened one second
later received its ack 2.37 s in, i.e. at the instant the first was cancelled,
and then transcribed successfully on the same cached session. Without the
watchdog it would still be waiting. Re-ran the live transcription (ready first,
59 incremental deltas, concat equal to the final text, word timestamps in
nanoseconds, eou and eob false), the citrinet refusal at both a right and a
wrong rate (UNIMPLEMENTED either way now), and Task 12's AudioTranscriptionStream
on nemotron_asr, which is unchanged.

Mutation testing the watchdog found a weakness in its own test: the destructor
test slept past the window inside the watched scope, so a destructor that
DETACHED the thread instead of joining it passed unnoticed. The test now uses a
window longer than the scope, which kills that mutant, and says why.

Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]
Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
2026-07-29 19:03:33 +00:00
2026-04-08 19:23:16 +02:00
2025-02-15 18:17:15 +01:00
2023-05-04 15:01:29 +02:00




LocalAI stars LocalAI License

Follow LocalAI_API Join LocalAI Discord Community

mudler%2FLocalAI | Trendshift

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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

A small LocalAI core with backends (llama.cpp, vLLM, MLX, whisper.cpp, stable-diffusion, kokoro, parakeet.cpp...) plugged in as separate on-demand images

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

Download LocalAI for 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-ai to 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

For older news and full release notes, see GitHub Releases and the News page.

Features

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
vllm.cpp From-scratch C++20 port of vLLM for text generation: paged KV cache, continuous batching, prefix caching, safetensors + GGUF loading, engine-enforced structured output, on CPU, CUDA, Metal and Vulkan
parakeet.cpp C++/GGML port of NVIDIA NeMo Parakeet ASR (tdt/ctc/rnnt/hybrid), with cache-aware streaming transcription
moss-transcribe.cpp C++/GGML port of OpenMOSS MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize: joint long-form transcription, speaker diarization and timestamping in a single pass
moss-tts.cpp C++/GGML port of the OpenMOSS MOSS-TTS family: text-to-speech (MOSS-TTS-Local v1.5, 48 kHz stereo) with reference-audio voice cloning, through the MOSS-Audio-Tokenizer neural codec
magpie-tts.cpp C++/GGML port of NVIDIA's Magpie TTS Multilingual 357M: 22.05 kHz mono text-to-speech in 5 voices and 9+ languages, with the NanoCodec neural codec and tokenizer/G2P embedded in a single GGUF
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
voice-detect.cpp Speaker recognition and voice analysis (ECAPA-TDNN, WeSpeaker, ERes2Net, CAM++, wav2vec2 age/gender/emotion), replacing the Python speaker-recognition backend
voxtral-tts.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
face-detect.cpp Face detection, recognition, demographics and anti-spoofing (SCRFD/ArcFace, YuNet/SFace), replacing the Python insightface backend
free-splatter.cpp Pose-free 3D reconstruction (FreeSplatter): turns a handful of plain photos into 3D Gaussians, no camera poses or GPU required
trellis2.cpp C++/GGML port of Microsoft TRELLIS.2: single-image to textured 3D mesh (GLB with PBR materials)
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

Team

LocalAI is maintained by a small team of humans, together with the wider community of contributors.

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:

Past sponsors


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

LocalAI Star history Chart

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!

Contributors

This is a community project, a special thanks to our contributors!

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