We introduce SpiRit-LM , a foundation multimodal language model that freely mixes text and speech. Our model is based on a 7B pretrained text language model that we extend to the speech modality by continuously training it on text and speech units. Speech and text sequences are concatenated as a single stream of tokens, and trained with a word-level interleaving method using a small automatically curated speech-text parallel corpus. SpiRit-LM comes in two versions: a Base version that uses speech phonetic units (HuBERT) and an Expressive version that models expressivity using pitch and style units in addition to the phonetic units. For both versions, the text is encoded with subword BPE tokens. The resulting model displays both the semantic abilities of text models and the expressive abilities of speech models. Additionally, we demonstrate that SpiRit-LM can learn new tasks in a few-shot fashion across modalities (i.e., ASR, TTS, Speech Classification). We make available model weights and inference code. 1 , 2

We introduce dGSLM, the first “textless” model able to generate audio samples of naturalistic spoken dialogues. It uses recent work on unsupervised spoken unit discovery coupled with a dual-tower transformer architecture with cross-attention trained on 2000 hours of two-channel raw conversational audio (Fisher dataset) without any text or labels. We show that our model is able to generate speech, laughter, and other paralinguistic signals in the two channels simultaneously and reproduces more naturalistic and fluid turn taking compared to a text-based cascaded model. 1 , 2

Finding word boundaries in continuous speech is challenging as there is little or no equivalent of a ‘space’ delimiter between words. Popular Bayesian non-parametric models for text segmentation (Goldwater et al., 2006 , 2009 ) use a Dirichlet process to jointly segment sentences and build a lexicon of word types. We introduce DP-Parse, which uses similar principles but only relies on an instance lexicon of word tokens, avoiding the clustering errors that arise with a lexicon of word types. On the Zero Resource Speech Benchmark 2017, our model sets a new speech segmentation state-of-the-art in 5 languages. The algorithm monotonically improves with better input representations, achieving yet higher scores when fed with weakly supervised inputs. Despite lacking a type lexicon, DP-Parse can be pipelined to a language model and learn semantic and syntactic representations as assessed by a new spoken word embedding benchmark. 1