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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

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Problem

I wanted a voice assistant with no cloud, no subscription and no audio leaving the house.

Approach

  1. 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.
  2. 02Whisper for speech recognition and Piper for synthesis over the Wyoming protocol, with Ollama running the model.
  3. 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.

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