Gradium released Phonon, a set of tiny open-weight text-to-speech models, the smallest of which is 31 million parameters and a 64 MB download. Gradium says it starts speaking in 7 milliseconds on a laptop CPU, with no GPU needed.
What it does
Phonon 31m speaks English with 37 voices and is Apache 2.0. Phonon 40m covers English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese, and the 40m multilingual version has 102 voices; both 40m models are CC BY-NC. Good for scratch voiceover and temp dialogue while you cut.
Worth knowing
Runs through Gradium's xn-ptts code and is already in MLX-Audio, Transformers, LM Studio and Ollama. Only the 31m English model allows commercial use.
ComfyUI v0.43.0, released on 27 October, is the first stable build with native support for MOSS-Image color and depth control and for MOSS-Image edit LoRAs, which until now needed a nightly build. It also adds ACEScg colour space to EXR saving, new Pad Image and Branch nodes, and partner nodes for Kling 4.0, PixVerse V6-Max, FLUX 3 Max and Ideogram Vector.
Henge is a free, open-source video studio that takes one guide video and a few pictures and gives the performance to a new character, swaps a character or only a head, or sharpens the footage. It runs MiniMax H3 through ComfyUI on your own GPU, on a rented RunPod machine, or from your PC with RunPod Serverless doing the rendering.
Krea 2 BBOX is a free community fine-tune of the open Krea 2 image model that follows a layout you write as boxes: panels, people, objects and word-for-word text each get their own position. It is built for multi-panel comics and storyboard pages, with speech bubbles that stay in their panel and characters that stay the same across panels.
PrunaAI released v0.2 of P-Q-Image-2.1, two free LoRA adapters that let the open Qwen-Image 2.1 model make or edit an image in 6 steps instead of about 40, with no CFG. The same day it published an official ComfyUI pack with ready workflows, so no custom nodes or community conversions are needed.
The Astravisualize team turned AI concept images of one bathroom into a 24-second vertical film by animating five separate views with MiniMax H3 running locally in ComfyUI, then cutting them in FFmpeg. Their write-up shares the exact camera prompts, the local settings and the takes they threw away.