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by arjie 1 day ago
Haha! Love to hear it. That's exactly what I have too: a claw-like[0] system which I originally used Sonnet for and now use my DeepSeek v4 Flash with.

In my case, I was foolish enough to run it all on my hardware which is pretty damned fast but has a duty cycle of 5% and runs idle most of the time. It's definitely better done via API.

Tell me more about the Alexa-like system! I have mine at home on a custom OpenWakeWord model trained on the word 'Aurora'. And I, too, have it hooked up to Home Assistant. I have a bunch of Eufy E21 baby cameras mounted on the walls[1] so it has vision through the house. The vision model uses GPT-5.5 on the subscription because I haven't yet set up a Qwen or Gemma multimodal that can see.

With Frigate on my home server I can even watch for events like my daughter waking up! And at night the agent sends out the vacuum if we've cleared the floor of baby toys. I feel this close to the dream of sci-fi AI. Because I auto-forward a bunch of my email to it etc. it knows about what's going on with me.

My wife will sometimes ask the agent information about me etc. and it's way easier to get a fast response rather than waiting for me to see the message etc.[2]

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538158

1: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-12-01/Grounding_Yo...

2: https://imgur.com/a/tP12lfj

3 comments

Privacy is the main benefit of running it yourself. Sending all of your personal info to random providers on openrouter would worry me. I don't mind it for code but if it's connected to my calendar and personal data, I want it running on my machine.

I can't wait until good enough models can run on affordable hardware.

I have these around the house:

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

Then you can set the background AI to be any OpenAI compatible API. So I just created one to my local Rust Agent, and connected it to home assistant. Now I can yell from the couch to create me a new Proxmox container with the next free static IP address etc. :D

This is very cool. I think I’ll get it instead of using my home built device (a respeaker attached to a low power machine). Looks like it supports custom wake words too. Thank you!

It’s funny how we converged on a similar system. My agent is also written in Rust.

Yes. I tested OpenClaw that burned 15€ just by starting it and I hated its configuration. Spent 20€ in tokens and built my own in a day, that does everything I want and sips tokens.

What a time to be alive.

Nice setup. Which home assistant do you use? I would love to bring alexa like capability to my setup.
Like the others I just wrote a simple agentic loop that listens to telegram and acts with a timeout to check other things, and with a timer to run scheduled jobs on a cron.

EDIT: Oh, home assistant. I use Home Assistant https://www.home-assistant.io/