---
title: How-to guides
slug: /how-to
description: Problem-oriented recipes. Each guide answers one "how do I X" with a worked session and its real output.
---

Practical guides covering common tasks. Each guide answers one concrete "how do I X" with a worked session: real commands or real code, with the output they produce. Read the [tutorial](../getting-started/first-model/01-pick-a-model.md) first; the guides assume its ground (sources, fetching, the family-owned commands) and go deeper on one problem at a time, in any order.

## Models and weights

- [Run a specific GGUF quantization](run-a-gguf-quantization.md): pick one weight option of a repo that ships many, by tag, glob or exact file.
- [Run fully offline](run-fully-offline.md): fetch on a connected machine, move the directory, and make any network touch an error.

## Running and serving

- [Serve a model over the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs](serve-openai-compatible.md): the full route table, streaming, operational flags, and pointing existing clients at it.
- [Transcribe audio](transcribe-audio.md): speech-to-text from the command line and over HTTP.
- [Translate text](translate-text.md): neural machine translation from the command line and over HTTP, with the model's own language codes.
- [Speak text](speak-text.md): text-to-speech with voice references and the synthesis knobs.
- [Estimate depth, segment and detect](depth-segment-detect.md): the three image verbs, one artifact per input, open-vocabulary detection included.
- [Benchmark a model on this machine](bench-a-model.md): the `bench` flow, its sweep axes and how to read the structured report.
- [Embed, compare and rerank](embed-and-rerank.md): dense vectors, similarity matrices and cross-encoder reranking, for texts and images.

## Scripting and integration

- [Script clikart-cli](script-the-cli.md): the exit-code contract, the stdout/stderr split, option templates and shell completion.
- [Add Modelverse to an existing CMake project](existing-cmake-project.md): `find_package` against the installed directory, staging the runtime beside your binary, and picking the dist on cross builds.

## Your own models and nodes

The custom-model track at its full depth; the gentle guided walk is the [Adding your own model tutorial series](../getting-started/own-model/01-a-model-from-scratch.md).

- [Register your own model family](register-your-own-family.md): what a snapshot directory must contain, identity matching, and the registration that makes your architecture runnable.
- [Add your own node to a model pipeline](add-a-pipeline-node.md): compose custom pre- or post-processing with the zoo's serving nodes, on the same request surface.
- [A conversational AI as one pipeline](conversational-ai-pipeline.md): speech-to-text, a chat model and text-to-speech composed into a single pipeline, wav bytes in and the spoken answer out.

## Complete programs

- [Additional examples](../examples.md): the standalone example programs, one per subsystem.

Sizing questions (which variant fits which device) live in [Model requirements](../model-requirements.md). For every public C++ name, the ClikaRT API reference on [/clikart](/clikart).