Automation & AI agentsZero — an offline voice assistant
Zero — an offline voice assistant
A voice assistant that wakes on its name and thinks on the laptop’s graphics card: no internet, no login, an answer in 0.3–0.6 seconds.
What it is
Mass-market voice assistants are all built the same way: the wake word is caught on the device, but the utterance itself travels to somebody else’s server. Two things follow — a delay that makes conversation impossible, and a recording of your voice leaving the house. This assistant is built the other way round: everything happens on the machine itself.
The wake word is listened for continuously, the speech is recognised on the spot, a local model answers, the voice is synthesised right there — the reply comes in three to six tenths of a second, that is, faster than a person can decide they were not heard. It handles timers, media and weather, and there is a command sphere you can talk to.
Specifications: Python, a local language model, voice synthesis on Piper, and a wake-word detector of its own; version 4. The bottleneck is named honestly and it is physical — the laptop’s built-in microphone: everything downstream of it is fast, what lets it down is the thing that listens.