[timwis]

Home Assistant have a fully local voice assistant experience that's very pluggable and customisable. I believe it uses a fast whisper model for STT and piper for TTS.

You can run it on a raspberry pi (or ideally an N100+), and for the microphone/speaker part, you can make your own or buy their off the shelf voice hardware, which works really well.

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/

[stavros]

Unfortunately I didn't manage to figure out how to make their hardware to work without a HA installation. I'd really love to do that, if anyone has any info on how their protocol works, please do tell.

I looked at their Wyoming docs online but couldn't really see how to even let it find the server, and the ESPhome firmware it runs offered similarly few hints.