Bunyi

Text to speech that stays on your machine

Bunyi — BOON-yee, /ˈbuːɲi/ — is Malay/Indonesian for “sound.”

A desktop app for Qwen3-TTS built for people who don’t use a terminal. Pick a voice, describe one, or clone one from a clip. Models download themselves with a progress bar; after that it generates offline, and the audio never leaves your computer.

Get started View source

macOS (Apple Silicon) works today and is built from source — there’s no signed release download yet. The Windows and Linux app is a scaffold, not a working build.

The Bunyi app icon: a white waveform on an indigo-to-violet gradient.

Three ways to make a voice

One text box, three modes

A segmented picker at the top switches modes. Every generation is 24 kHz mono WAV, auto-played when it finishes and saved to the app’s Outputs folder — one click from a reveal button.

Preset voice

Pick from the model’s speakers

Choose a built-in speaker, set a language, and optionally add a style instruction to steer emotion and delivery.

Voice design

Describe the voice you want

Write a description — “a calm older narrator, slightly gravelly” — and the model builds a voice to match. Style instructions apply here too.

Voice clone

Match a reference clip

Give it a short clip and its transcript. Bunyi resamples to 24 kHz mono for you, and if you leave the transcript blank it transcribes the clip on-device.

Emotion and clones. Cloning runs on the Base model, which isn’t instruction-tuned, so there’s no style field in clone mode — the emotion has to come from the reference clip’s own delivery. Keeping one saved voice per emotion is the practical workaround. This is a limit of today’s 12 Hz models, not of the app.

What’s in the box

Built so nobody has to open a terminal

Models download themselves

First generation in a mode fetches that model (~1.5–4.5 GB) with a progress bar and an ETA (“42% — about 3.1 MB/s, ~6 min left”). Resumable, incremental, and skipped entirely once complete.

Offline after that

A complete model on disk is used with no network at all. Generation, playback, and file output are local.

Stall detection

A disk monitor logs bytes-on-disk every 10 seconds during a multi-gigabyte file and warns when nothing new has landed for 30 — so a dead connection looks different from a slow one.

Saved voices

Store a clone recipe — name, reference clip, transcript. The clip is copied into app storage, so it survives relaunch and folder cleanups.

On-device transcription

Cloning needs the reference transcript to align audio to words. Leave it blank and the app transcribes locally (Apple’s Speech framework on macOS); anything you type wins.

Backup and restore

Archive the whole models folder to one stored (uncompressed) zip with a real progress bar and a Stop button. Restore merges per repo and never clobbers a model you already have.

Bring your own model host

Each mode takes a Hugging Face repo ID or an https:// base URL you control. Bunyi reads manifest.txt from your server and pulls the files directly.

Your own models folder

Point storage at an external drive and it stays there across launches. Settings also shows copyable hf download commands with the real path filled in.

A real log window

Timestamped, selectable, copyable. Downloads, tokenizer steps, transcription results, token milestones, output paths and timings, and full error text.

Won’t lose your work

Closing the window mid-download or mid-generation asks first, with “Keep Working” as the safe default.

Status, honestly

Three operating systems, two codebases, one spec

Qwen3-TTS has no single cross-platform runtime — MLX is Apple-Silicon only — so Bunyi is native apps per platform, kept at feature parity by a shared specification rather than shared code.

TargetStackStatus
macOS
Apple Silicon, macOS 15+		 Swift + MLX + SwiftUI Working
Reference implementation; build it yourself
Windows and Linux
One app, both systems		 C# .NET + Avalonia + ONNX Runtime Scaffold
Structure, build docs, and stubs — not yet implemented

The spec is the source of truth. Observable behavior lives in FEATURES.md, and on-disk layout lives in DATA-FORMATS.md — so a models folder, a backup zip, or a voices library is interchangeable between apps of the same runtime family. A feature change updates the spec and every app.

Get it running

Build the macOS app

There’s no notarized download yet, so today this means a build from source on an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 15 or later, with Xcode 26 (the app uses Swift 6.2 and mlx-swift’s Metal toolchain).

  1. Clone and generate the Xcode project

    The .xcodeproj is generated from project.yml and isn’t checked in — edit the YAML, never the project.

    git clone https://github.com/shaztechio/bunyi-app.git
cd bunyi-app/apps/macos
brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate

  2. Install the Metal toolchain

    Xcode 26 ships the Metal compiler separately, and mlx-swift compiles shaders. Skip this and the first build fails with “cannot execute tool ‘metal’”.

    xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain

  3. Build and run

    Open Bunyi.xcodeproj and press ⌘R, or build from the command line. Xcode resolves swift-qwen3-tts and its dependencies on the first build.

    xcodebuild -scheme "Bunyi" -destination 'platform=macOS' build

  4. Generate something

    Type text, pick a mode, hit Generate. The first run in each mode downloads that mode’s model with a progress bar; every run after that is offline.

Working on Windows or Linux? The .NET app is a scaffold — start from apps/dotnet/AGENTS.md and the spec. It can’t be built on a Mac.