Speech models that run on 8 GB

43 models with published weights that fit in 8 GB — a phone, a base iPad, an Air. Counted at four-bit quantisation, weights only, leaving the machine about a third of its memory and a gigabyte for context: room for roughly 7 billion parameters. A mixture of experts is counted in full, because it is held in full even though only a few experts compute.

The memory of a phone, a base iPad or an entry-level laptop. What fits is small: models of a few billion parameters, quick and cheap to run, good at summarising, classifying and simple extraction, and out of their depth on long reasoning. This is also where on-device makes the most sense, because the alternative is a network round trip for something that takes a moment.

Models that read text aloud. They are usually priced per character, which makes the arithmetic simple: a thousand characters is roughly a paragraph. The real choices are the voice itself, whether you may clone one, how much control you have over emotion and pacing, and latency — a model that sounds wonderful in a rendered file may be too slow to hold a conversation.

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Speech models Models that run on 8 GB