Key facts
- Underdog said Woof has 31 million parameters and is open for anyone to download.
- The demo is a browser game with a typewriter that speaks typed text and a tuner that generates music.
- Underdog launched Bark, a 167MB speech-to-text model for transcription and dictation, weeks before the Woof demo.
- Founder Sigil Wen said he built the app so users could run AI models on their own devices and own their data.
- Underdog also released a 27-billion-parameter model that can run on laptops and a waitlisted locally hosted app.
Underdog released a browser game built with its new speech model, Woof, which the company says is 32MB and can run on most devices without an internet connection. The model has 31 million parameters and is open for anyone to download, the startup said.
The game places users in a room with a retro tech theme, including a typewriter, a CRT monitor and a desk lamp that makes a sound when its switch is clicked. Users can type anything on the typewriter and the game speaks it back, and can rotate a music tuner to generate different kinds of music. The intro warns users about "intrusive" cloud providers in the town, which TechCrunch described as a jab at cloud-based models.
Sigil Wen, the founder of Underdog, told TechCrunch he started building the app because, instead of using notetakers like Granola, he wanted to build his own system with AI models that run on users' devices and let them own their data. "I think we will be able to run most capable models of today on the devices you already own within months," Wen said, referring to his manifesto. "We just want to train the best open models that are American-made, that are open, that are capable and allow people to have private AI."
The demo comes weeks after Underdog launched Bark, a 167MB speech-to-text model also designed to run on edge devices for transcription and dictation. In addition to the two voice models, Underdog has released a 27-billion-parameter model that can run on laptops, along with a waitlisted app the company positions as a locally hosted alternative to Muse and Instinct.