Case study · 10
Offline voice assistant
A push-to-talk handheld that runs speech and the LLM entirely on my own network.
- Role
- Personal project
- Status
- Built, shelved
- Read
- 1 min
- Stack
- Raspberry PiWhisperPiperOllamaWyoming protocolsystemd
512 MB
handheld RAM, so every model runs on a server Pi
Problem
I wanted a voice assistant with no cloud, no subscription and no audio leaving the house.
Approach
- 01A thin handheld records audio and plays replies. Speech-to-text, text-to-speech and the LLM are served over HTTP from a 4 GB Pi.
- 02Whisper for speech recognition and Piper for synthesis over the Wyoming protocol, with Ollama running the model.
- 0314 bugs root-caused and logged, including out-of-memory reboots that pushed TTS off the handheld.
No cloud, no subscription and no audio leaving the house.
Results
- The day-one build worked end to end.
- It became the origin of Hermes Agent.
What I'd do next
- Revive it on the current mesh network.